The inherent beauty of things

When I graduated from 10th grade (I still have no idea how I made it through), I had a pretty important decision to make. I had to choose a stream or a course. In India, there are currently three main streams: Science, Arts and Commerce.

Most people choose Science as their stream of choice.This is because as a student of Science you can pursue Science, Arts or Commerce after 12th grade; but a Commerce or Arts student is limited to their respective courses as you require pre-requisite scientific knowledge to get a Bachelor's degree in any science major.

I picked Science for this reason and also the fact that I find Biology fascinating. However, it also meant that I'd have to deal with the dismal and utterly soul-crushing sciences of Physics and Chemistry.

I've always hated anything to do with numbers and their application. My father, who's a Chartered Accountant; shakes his head in disbelief at my relative ineptitude at Maths and yet I managed to float through the subject and was relieved to drop it after 10th grade but it was only after starting 11th grade with Physics as one of my majors did I realise that I wasn't done yet. 

With Maths, more often than not, you are given some complex calculations to solve; once you find the solution to it, you're done with it. With Physics, you have to do complex calculations and apply them in ridiculously convoluted ways to understand numerous phenomena!

And then came Chemistry. This was a far cry from the chemistry that was logical up until 10th grade. Numbers came in force here as well, albeit with reduced vigour. The problem with Chemistry is that it's impossible to remember all of its minutiae. A single chapter of Chemistry has a mind-numbing number of concepts, properties, equations and values. To make things worse, it seemed incredibly impractical. Why on earth would I need to know the number of lone pairs of electrons in XeOF4?!

11th grade was unsurprisingly a bitter pill to swallow. I slaved through online class after online class, trying to comprehend the sheer scale of things until one day I decided to stop bothering and leave it for the exams. It didn't exactly help with my grades as they started to seep downwards. I was dumb-struck at how these teachers ever managed to understand a word of what, they now preach with as much ease as you would display in drinking water. 

Come 12th grade, after my very first physics exam, I almost flunked. This meant that I needed to make a radical change. I decided to try something I had dreaded previously: start physics tuitions. I prided myself on not getting any tuition till 12th grade and finally did so with reluctance. Gone was that precious 1 hour every Monday to Friday. and now I had to slog through derivations during that hour of blissful ignorance.

I started to feel like I'd regret it.

Then my tuition teacher started teaching me. Ever heard of that saying "You just need the right teacher"? This. This teacher was my right teacher.

The man scoffed at memorization and instead tried to explain the phenomena to me(which I daresay was a challenge of gigantic proportions). He explained to me how current is made, how the tiniest of sub-atomic particles with their miniscule movements brought about some of the greatest phenomena that man has ever seen.

I felt like a toddler again, looking with wonder at all that was around me. Things that I'd taken for granted, electricity, light, wind, heck even my glasses! Everything was physics!

I remember him saying in our first class. Everything around you is physics, you just have to open your eyes to it(paraphrasing a bit).

Bit by bit he taught me about charges, potential, capacitance and other terms which sounded incredibly dry and sterile in the beginning, but somehow he did the impossible. He made me understand why they existed.

Earlier I mentioned that one of the primary reasons for me choosing Science was that I loved Biology. The reason for me liking Biology when I despised the other two sciences, was that I loved to understand how organisms stayed alive. What made them tick, the sheer magnitude of processes occurring within them, why they were different and indeed, what made them different.

After gaining an appreciation for Physics, I wondered why I didn't like Physics and Chemistry as readily as Biology from the get go. Surely they also explained much in great detail and would serve to interest me?

And then it struck me. It was the medium. Physics explained what it had to explain through the medium of equations and mathematical formulae, Chemistry explained its mysteries through its myriad number of reactions and reaction mechanisms. Biology was explained plainly in sentences much like you would explain History or Geography. 

I excelled in Biology purely because I could absorb ideas better when they were written in front of me. I could always comprehend what I read much better than these equations which tortured me at their very sight.

I could come to peace with Physics now because I had understood how to convert those equations to simple ideas which I could grasp and I could now understand the very beauty of these equations.

It would be best explained with a simple equation

I=q/t

One of the simplest equations in Physics. I= q/t, it seems dry and bland at first sight but you have to imagine.

One would think that imagination is not suited for a subject based on facts and reality such as Physics but this is where they are mistaken. Physics relies on your imagination! It is this very simple factor that stops us from the realisation of the beauty within it. The boulder that impedes our way to the peak.

Faraday, one of the greatest scientists in Modern Physics was not a learned man and yet he created the most fundamental equation for one of the greatest concepts within Modern Physics: Electromagnetic Induction! How did he do it? Through his imagination.

Once you can see that charge whizzing by at a tremendous speed in your mind's eye, then you've understood that concept! Equations can be likened to a screwdriver. Sure you could use it to screw something in but you need to know where the screw is don't you? They are like the paintbrush to your artistic ideas. Vital, but not as vital as the idea.

I remember after one of those tuition classes; going outside and sitting on my father's scooter gazing at the street light shining and being struck with this realisation. The realisation that the beauty we crave for is all around us.

The first time you see a rainbow you're in awe of it! Those seven colours shining by the horizon; the beauty is almost breathtaking. The second time it becomes less so. After some time, you'll grow to take it for granted. That's because aesthetic beauty is fleeting and will lose its charm after a while.

However, if you know how that rainbow came into existence, how so many rays of light were reflected an unimaginable number of times to come out into the sky with this dizzying array of colours, then that beauty that you feel? It is everlasting. It is true beauty.

It reminds me of the famous saying, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Once you understand the reason for something or indeed the "why" behind it you'll have felt as if you were there with it through its genesis and that is a sensation that can be seldom defeated by other senses. 

Why does this happen, however? I've mentioned many times that we have a thirst to know. When we understand the underlying cause of something, we can see its true nature which is an infinitely better experience than just gazing upon its aesthetic beauty.

Yet another example proves this. Entropy is a quantity that measures the randomness of a system. It is commonly used in thermodynamics and yet it is a principle that I find applications for, in life.

One of the core tenets of entropy is that it increases as the factors of a system increases, that is to say if I had a magnet in a box, the entropy in that box is lesser than two or more magnets in a box. A simple statement, and yet it is almost hauntingly real in its truth. It is something that we can overlook so easily and so quickly.

Why are we attracted to such a concept? Simple, because it gives randomness a definite value. Randomness is disorder, it is unreliable and it is raw, however when you introduce entropy everything falls into place, it is now definite and in that definiteness, you can see its beauty.

And this is true beauty. The beauty that you get from just seeing something is nowhere near to the beauty that you can experience when you understand how it came to be. True, iridescent beauty is that which you can understand. It is what you can feel within the deepest recesses of your mind.

And it's out there, in every flower you see, in every raindrop that falls, in every person you meet. 

You just need to find the language that it exists in.