No two humans shall be the same.

        

     

Right this instant there are about 7,196,723, 800 and counting people in the world. 50.2% of these are female, while the rest are male.  54% are Asian, 15% Hispanic, 15% white, 8% Middle Eastern and 8% black. 13% are typical introverts, 13% extroverts and 70% are somewhere in the middle. The breakdown goes further into hobbies, living conditions, family background among others. We might have a lot in common but we’ll never be the same. Physics summarizes it all in the Pauli Exclusion principle.

            Why then does society propagate conformity so much so that it has become a natural tendency? You will be called names, bullied and rejected just for being different. According to society, it is for the greater good. Speaking of the greater good, even electrons know about it.  With electrons, the greater good means minimizing energy. This is done by occupying lower orbits that are closer to the nucleus. Problem is, if all electrons occupied the lowest energy level, all atoms would be practically the same; there would no chemical reactions. They would no light and consequently no life. So that doesn’t happen and it won’t happen, electrons –as Pauli predicts- spread out in different orbits just like the planets around the sun.

            There is a reason why Albert Einstein is famous and that has little to do with how smart he was. Einstein came up with the theory of special and general relativity. The theory where he speaks in four dimensions, where space and time is one and the same thing and where everything in the universe is just energy in disguise. This doesn’t sound like physics at all, more like a child’s narrative of his/her imagination. A narrative we would normally discard as it is afterall- childish. Bottom line is it was a different explanation nothing like Newton or Faraday would propose. 

            Looking at the legends, I realize they had little in common. Apart from the love for what they did they lead very different lives. While Marie Curie was born to a scientific family, Michael Faraday was born to a blacksmith. While most of them were in good physical condition, Stephen Hawking is in a wheel chair. While Isaac Newton was a mathematics whiz, Albert Einstein actually hated math.   They didn’t put aside these differences to fit into the traditional model. Instead they embraced these differences and used them to their advantage.

            All electrons are basically the same, but Pauli’s principle dictates that no two of them can have the same behavior. Some will be energetic and some will not. Some will spin this way and the others the other way. That is the only way life is possible. Similarly, humans can never be the same. Even though traditions and cultures bound us and try to make us look the same, there will always be diversity. So the moral of the story is simple,” Be yourself, others are taken”; cliché but true.