Tag: The Human Condition (Page 2 of 2)

What is work?

Scientifically, one of the more simpler formula to calculate work is –

W = F.d

where,  ‘F’ is the force applied, and ‘d’ is the distance moved.

In the middle of ‘F’ and ‘d’ you see a small, almost insignificant, dot.

That dot operator is the soul of the concept of work. It means that work is only done in the direction of application of force. So, for example, if I am pushing (hence applying a force to) a rock towards the north, then I will only have done work if the rock also moves in the northern direction, even if by the smallest amount. If the movement of the rock is exactly tangential to my force, towards the east or west, then I have not done any work. Additionally, if the rock moves, even slightly, towards the south, then it would mean the rock has done work on me. Realise that the rock cannot be moving both towards the north and the south, implying that, at any given instant of time, it is impossible for two objects to mutually do non-zero work on each other.

But what about thinking of work from a deeper perspective? What does it mean to really do work?

Work is any action that changes the existing tendencies of how the world is playing out.

Let’s think about this.

Imagine a flowing river. I then put an object, for example a log of wood, into the river. What will happen?

The river will carry away the log in its current, and the log will have joined the tendency of the river to flow. Some change happened – now there is one more thing flowing in the river than there was earlier, but the tendency of the river to flow hasn’t diminished. On the contrary, it has increased. Now, the momentum of the log, in addition to the momentum of the drops of the river, will also play a role in coaxing any new object that may fall in the river to move along with the river’s flow.

So, the log did not do any work. It simply placed itself in the existing tendencies of the world, in this case the river, and then the flow of the river did all the work and carried it away (yes, the river did some work, as the log which was earlier stationary is now going as fast as the river).

Understand what happened here. On account of laziness, lack of will or motivation, or maybe the absence of any aim of his own, the log let himself be used by the river and is now doing what the river asks it to do, namely, drag other similar elements into the current and make them go in the direction the river is doing. The river has strengthened itself, and the log has lost his existence. He has now become a sheep.

Let’s take another example.

We have all experienced the force of wind during a storm. Even on a small scale, when you blow air at a feather lying on the table, it gently flies away. The force exerted by the air on that feather did work on it, and moved it. It did some work.

I remember one special case that we studied back in high school in our lectures on work and its relation to energy. Our teacher explained to us that free expansion of gas into vacuum did no work.

Think about this.

When we open a bottle of soft drink, it produces fizz, which is nothing but the gas carbon di-oxide. As this gas, present at a higher pressure inside the bottle, comes outside, it meets the atmospheric mixture of gases which are at a lower pressure. It essentially pushes against that gas, doing work in the process.

In vacuum, when pressurised gas is given free rein to expand, it meets no resistive force – the entire space is empty and the gas can expand however it feels like.

Work implies some effort, some action against something that is opposing your tendency to do that work. We do work when we push a stone on the ground as we are opposing the friction that the ground offers, as well as the initial tendency of the stone to stay in a state of rest.

It may be useful to re-interpret the work that we humans do in this light.

If you are joining the existing structures, whether social, political, economic, cultural or any other, without asking yourself why, or without weighing the implications of both that action and the thought leading to that action, then you are not doing anything on your own. You are taking your place in the existing scheme of things. You have made no difference.

If you want to make a difference, bring about some change, then you will need to ask certain questions, reflect on the foundations of those systems, engage with it and find out why it is not amenable to your conception of that system, if that is the case.

Realise that work in the human sphere, unlike the world of physics, can be said to be done even if you go with the flow, in the direction of where the system is going, as long as you have valid reasons for doing so, and this choice is the result of critical, honest and rational thinking on your part.

If you try to change something that has existed for some time, there will be resistance both from tangible entities like people, and also intangible entities like the system created by those people, on account of inertia to change as also the amount of time it takes for such systems to reflect the changes done within them, and for the effects of those changes to rise and come out macroscopically.

There cannot be change without resistance. And there cannot be work, useful work in any case, without it calling into question the existing frameworks, even if at a conceptual level.

If you blindly accept how the world is, and then let your actions be moulded by it, then you are a spiritually dead person, like a rock. You have no free will but live in the illusion that you do.

An attitude to question is a necessity for being alive.

I distinctly remember three of the earliest books that my mother bought for me when I was small. They were The Ugly Duckling, Jack and the Beanstalk and a third book the name of which I don’t remember. But I remember the third book because it had a handle. Yes, a book with a handle. A tiny briefcase appropriate for the small hands that were meant to hold it.

Then followed a hiatus of an appreciable duration, the reasons of which I neither remember nor feel important enough to go into at this point. I was mainly occupied with John Grisham, Khaled Hosseini, Dan Brown and a couple of others during these years, with a singular spurt for Rowling in the months preceding the release of Half Blood Prince.

All of a sudden, I find I have turned 16 and my interest has started to lean towards cosmology. I read Brian Greene, Michio Kaku and a bit of Paul Davies during this time.

A chance visit to a roadside bookstall in 2008, with my parents in tow, refuelled the hunger for books within me, and I bought five of them, among them The Agony and the Ecstasy. And, in a visit to a bookshop the following year, I bought Crime and Punishment.

These two books, along with All Quite on the Western Front, an early 70s edition of which I had borrowed from a friend, had a tremendous impact on me, the nature of which deserves and demands another post of its own. But suffice it to say, they completely transformed my beliefs about what was possible to be achieved through writing, what I expected from the books I read after that, and my general perception of the power of the written word.

In the next few years I read a variety of authors from varied genres, and Dostoyevsky receded into my subconscious and unconscious.

And then one fine day, I asked myself the question – “How exactly did the words of Dostoyesvky effect this transformation in me?”.

And lo and behold. I realised I remembered nothing of importance.

I distinctly remembered the name Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov – the kind of eventful name only dementia can make you forget; I vaguely remembered the names of the other characters, and I only remembered the plot from an eagle’s view.

What was happening? I remember reading somewhere that the books we read are like the food we eat – we cannot pinpoint which part of the body stored the nutrients we got from a particular meal we had at some point in the past, but the energy of that meal was absorbed by our body, and some part of it lives on in our muscles and bones.

This is a beautiful romanticised way of looking at what we read. The books live on within us through their afterglow, a glow that instils warmth in our mind and soul. Their remnants are vague memories, memories that became the changes they effected. This is the transformative power – the words we read are not mere words, they are forces and their nature changes depending on what they interact with. The unlucky soul who could not experience the love of his parents will look at Harry Potter as, more than anything else, an orphan who searches throughout his life for emotional stability. To someone else who could never go to a good school, Harry Potter may be a source of envy, for he had such good teachers and mentors throughout his seven years at Hogwarts.

Books transform into a reflection of how the reader looks at the world. And since each reader holds a different prism in his hand, a given book could take on innumerable interpretations, in fact as many different ones as the number of people who read it. The only dimension of the human condition that comes so close to such a fragrant diversity of perceivable forms is the world of art, literature included.

I was born in the last decade of the twentieth century. Millennia of human history had already played out before me. Why does this fact not bother me? Why does it not overwhelm me with a feeling of being disjointed from that history?

Why do I feel so at-ease since my childhood days?

In other words, why does an understanding of the sheer magnitude of the quantity of information relating with the history of mankind not unnerve me, and how do I, so effortlessly, take my place in the scheme of things, taking all of that information to be self-evident?

Where did I imbibe all of this?

Each successive generation has access to more information about its past. Before the invention of writing, all of this information was passed on orally, and this is in fact how the myths and legends, prevalent in virtually all cultures around the world, formed. And this is also why we know almost nothing of that period, except through archaeological remains, or in ancient treatises that mention them.

The written word is the storehouse of mankind’s knowledge. It is the sum total of all we know, what we think about the things we know, and what are the next things we could possibly come to know. It stores the past, and shapes our future.

I did not grow up to become a cosmologist, but Stephen Hawking did. And he told me about black holes.

I did not grow up to be a neurologist, but Oliver Sacks did. And he told me about visual agnosia.

I did not grow up to be a philosopher, but Immanuel Kant did. And he told me about the relation between things as they actually are, and things as they appear to us.

Need more?

I did not grow up to be a musician, but John Powell did. And he told me what an arpeggio really is.

I did not grow up to be a mathematician, but Ian Stewart did. And he told me about the Riemann Hypothesis.

I did not grow up to be a poet, but Thomas Campbell did. And he told me about Lord Ullin’s Daughter.

I did not grow to be an X, but Y did. And he told me about Z.

I can fill anything I want into X, and find a corresponding Y. And Y will, then, lead me to a Z.

A new Z each time I read. What else can I want from my life!

And that is why I read.