Dreamers

            When Thomas Edison was in elementary school, his teachers called him ‘addled’ simply  because his mind always wondered. He only had his mother to keep him strong. Of course he wondered his way to 1093 inventions and a name that will last to eternity.  The Wright brothers, were forced to drop out of school for one reason or another, but hey that didn’t stop them from making a flying machine. When Michael Faraday was Humphry Davy’s valet, Davy’s wife treated him in the meanest possible way.  Michael almost gave up on science in general. I’m pretty sure this woman took her words back when Michael became the president of the Royal Society of England and a household name. Our very own William Kamkwamba was considered crazy by his kinsmen.  It all turned around when they saw electricity, wind mills and the fame.

            So I guess, from here you know where I am getting at; Persistence. It’s a virtue that all dreamers have in common. What’s funny because almost every day we wake up to people who tell us we won’t make it;  People who call us crazy for doing something out of the odds, People who have prejudices against us out of race, gender and physical appearance. Their voice becomes so strong that we actually believe it.  If all these great people listened to this noise, we would still be living like the 18^th century or worse. And yes it becomes noise once you keep hearing it every now and then.

            People talk, and mostly they talk about things they don’t know about. They knew Edison’s mind wandered but they didn’t know that it was bursting with ideas that will change the world. They didn’t know Galileo was right until after they sacked him.So here is a practical suggestion, prove them wrong. Ignore this noise until it becomes applause. In short fake it till you make it. It is how dreamers roll.

The ghost

You wake up to a cold morning, you recharge your phone, you boil water, and there I am behind the socket, behind the oven. You rush to work, thinking you can avoid me but no there I am behind the traffic lights. You fill your vehicle with gas and there I am staring back at you. You can’t escape me now, can you? You go to the office and guess what? There is nothing you can do without me, all machines need me. You try to escape by going to lunch, but you hear music, which obviously means I’m there. Time has passed and you want a break from me, you drive back home, Oh wait, you need to refill gas, there I am on the display. Anyways you reach home, first thing you do is turn the light on. You know I’m the genie behind it all. Well, that is just how you use me directly; I haven’t considered the products you use that were made with me. So, here is the deal start acknowledging the fact that you can’t live without because sooner or later I will be the definition of life. Just in case you have no clue, my name is electricity and I’m the ghost you can’t avoid.

            Well, 500 years ago, nobody knew me, nobody took me seriously, no one even thought of the possibility of using me. If I was anything, I was just a science topic, may I add, at elementary school. It all started with a couple of mistakes, rather I call them accidents. Benjamin Franklin, Galvani and Oersted observed rather unusual incidences and built the foundation for me. I regard Faraday as my father since it was he who demonstrated how useful I can be.  Thomas Edison raised me; he saw potential in me and made 1000 mistakes just to see how I can power a light bulb. I could go on forever just pointing my family tree but the moral of the story stays the same. I was born from an accident and raised through mistakes by men (and women) who took actual risk.

            It may sound a bit unwise to follow the footsteps of my parents on child rearing, but hey look at how I turned out. I’m like the blood in your veins; you are practically dead without me. To make something as powerful as me and be as memorable as my parents you have got to take risks. Make mistakes, at the end of the day it is only the success that will matter. This is just something I wanted you to know. I have to get back to work but in case you forget I will remind you, I am after all a ghost and I am everywhere…

Identity

            I believe in a world with more peace, more serenity, more understanding, less conflicts. I know the sound the naivety of this belief screams louder than the actual message but I will justify it anyway.  Plato believed that all people desire happiness and they behave otherwise because they do not know which actions produce happiness. This is true, not because I’m assuming but because I know so.

            In school, lecturers call us engineers instead of engineering students. I am not sure if they know this, but the uplifting feeling they leave with me is just awesome. I am aware that they do this because of math, ‘engineers’ is shorter than ‘engineering students’ but hey, they just did. There is a record that only a third of engineering freshmen actually graduate , so when your professor calls you an engineer before you’ve got a certificate you have no choice but to embrace the idea they believe in you. By ‘they’ I mean educators. Well, for me, this feeling keeps me going through the workload and all other stories only engineers can tell.

            I know we live in a world where first impressions can practically determine the kind of house you’ll own. Sad, as it may be, I envision a world where we labeled people based on their ambition or goals in other words. Where we would see a convict, we see a possibly responsible citizen, where we saw a robber we see a man who is simply trying to provide for his family. Imagine that world; I can already see tension released from your face. I have been visualizing this world and it seems like the perfect solution for the turbulent place we call home. 

            People reciprocate how we treat them.  We judge them by their past, they show more of it, we support their future and they will likewise work on it. Most of us instinctively know that.  I’m taking the liberty of assuming Plato was right, for no other reason but the fact that he makes sense.  All people desire happiness, not pleasure, not riches, but happiness. That basically means that all people want the same thing, only that we find it in different things. That being said, all people desire to better themselves in one way or another. Having an identity based on where we are going rather than who we were is a win-win-win situation.

            It takes more than imagination to see the world in a different light. At least, more people would have to be convinced first. But hey a journey is made of small steps. Tap the positive side of people and watch what happens. I guarantee you, it’s good for your health –I mean social health and spiritual health  of course. Good luck!

Entropy

            Entropy: a fascinating Greek word.  Scientifically entropy is the degree of randomness of a system, so a high value of entropy means a large degree of randomness. The table I’m looking at is a great example of the things with high entropy- if you know what I mean.  I’m fascinated by the word mainly because it is the key word of a certain scientific law- the second of thermodynamics. One way to state this law is “During the course of every spontaneous process, the entropy of the universe increases”.  Point taken, the universe loves a little disorder and it is really easy to prove. It is easy or rather spontaneous for a glass to shutter into pieces and physically impossible to glue the pieces back together. I don’t know who postulated this law but I’m sure it was a genius.

            Instead of referring to hypothetical systems I’d rather speak of daily entropy that keeps increasing every second of every minute- the randomness of life. A lot of times I realize just how messed up life can be. I make plans, they fall apart so I make new ones, they fail, I keep planning until the outcome is a completely different version of what I had envisioned. It happens a lot that I have learnt to play games with the universe. I have to come to realize that the universe rewards the player who plays the most.

            There are conflicts today; both interpersonal and intrapersonal because of one reason and you guessed it-entropy. It is really hard to fight the universe considering we found it here. We want peace and it wants to shake things up. That doesn’t mean submitting to randomness; only lord knows how worse this table would look. It requires discipline hard work to put order to this world, to put plans into actions. If plans will still not work out, then I say get creative and join the fun. The universe will have no choice but to support you.

           

Science madness

            “The laws of Physics are the same in every inertial frame of reference.”  Yeah, so?  Isn’t that obvious? … or at least supposed to be obvious? Those were the thoughts on my mind when I read that law. It’s actually the first postulate of the famous theory of relativity by Albert Einstein.  But let’s face it, are obvious statements like these what turns scientists into nerds? I’m confused.  So Newton says that a body won’t move unless a force is acted on it and scientists go on sleepless nights contemplating it.  Hello, I think I knew that since kindergarten!

            Well, since I am one of those nerds who don’t sleep decoding theories of dead men, it’s only fair that I speak in their defense. If that was all to science then it wouldn’t even be a subject, much less a field of study.  If that was all to science then we would just sit around stating that water cools in cold  weather and call ourselves SIRs and that would have been very realistic – sarcastically speaking.  

            When Albert Einstein stated the theory of mass-energy conversion, he stated something that someone had thought about before but was perhaps too afraid to develop it. So, the genie in Albert came not because he knew it all along but because he wasn’t afraid to answer the childhood questions that troubled his mind. Isn’t that what science is all about? Isn’t it about trying to explain the universe in the best way we see fit?  Although we don’t know what is happening to the rest of the universe, we start by explaining ours.

            Out of Einstein’s famous equation E = mc² we can produce electricity from nuclear reactors.  We apply Newton’s law of motion in literally everything – our vehicles, factories, any machine you can think of. That is what physics merged with engineering does. It makes life easier-better.  I could go on forever about what science does but I guess the 21^st generation can do that pretty well.

            It is a stereotype that science is a hard subject and yes it is hard indeed. It is for the minds that won’t sleep unless questions are answered, minds that will make equations out of the obvious, minds that will transform equations to a better life.  It is hard, but listening to the stereotype makes it even harder. Come on, science is as easy as stating that a computer will remain shut down unless I turn it on keeping the number of users constant of course. Well, if you believe that, welcome aboard and join the fun!