Human Physics: What Does Physics Teach Us?

“The law of gravity doesn’t care who we are or who’s doing the physics or not. So that is, to me, an ultimate sense of belonging. You know, that connection with the universe is not filtered through any systems made up by any human beings. Those laws are the same.” 
- Shohini Ghose

Every field provides you with a certain structure to view the world uniquely and make the most sense out of it — I found mine through physics and music. Once we dive deep into whichever field, we begin to see how life and human relationships can imitate certain concepts in that field. To be more specific, when I look at how physical quantities interact with each other and how uncertainty is perceived by scientists, I can connect the logic behind these concepts to view the world in a more organized manner; in a manner designed to fulfill my intellectual and emotional needs. In this article, I’ll show you how understanding something as small as the behavior of an atom could lead to understanding all of our behavior as human beings. Note that this is an attempt to explain how physics influenced my perspectives and views on life rather than an explanation of certain concepts in physics.

In the Network of Interactions —atoms, concepts, cats and human beings

"The universe is weaved by the interactions. And information doesn't go from one system to another without something happening to both systems" -Carlo Rovelli

Just like how the universe is weaved by interactions, our characters are weaved by the interactions we experience. We understand reality by seeing how things connect to other things, and ourselves by how we connect to different things and people. What we have in the world exists in events, not in fixed objects — the atom has a property because it interacts with you or with something else, and you have certain charactersitics because you interact with the world.

Atoms

Let’s live in the puzzling world of quantum mechanics for a moment and look at a classic example: two-door box with one atom inside. You ask yourself: “Which door did this atom actually go through?”

What you’re asking about here is a property of the atom which is its position; part of its wave function that containts all information about the atom and its charactersitics. If you assume that it went through this or that door before you observe it, then you’re wrong and for one good reason. You make a mistake once you assume a location for an unobserved atom. An atom will have a location, a property, with respect to you once it’s obsereved — once it’s interacting with you.

Concepts

In understanding any physical quantity or concept, scientists observe its interactions and its effect on other things in our world — whether that interaction is with some liquid, gas, a human being, a giraffe, or with another physical quantity. The harder time we have in trying to define a physical quantity, the more interactions we have to look at in order to understand its behavior and define it nicely.

Let’s take a simple example: speed. Speed is the time rate at which an object is moving along a path. As we see here, we understand speed by observing how time and distance covered by something or someone is interacting all together. There would be no speed to ever exist if it was totally isolated as a physical quantity.

Now let’s take a more complex example: time. Everyone seems to feel like they know what time is very easily, but what is it really? It’s such a puzzling question. When we’re trying to gain better knowledge on something, like time, we simply observe how it interacts with other physical quantities such as heat, speed, entropy, gravity, etc. — very similar to the way we try to understand ourselves as human beings.

Cats and Human Beings

Other beings that consist of a massively large collection of atoms behave just like the single atom in a two-door box, just perhaps in a more complex way since their interactions are more complex.

Schrödinger’s lonely cat in the box, as we all know, is in a superposition of being alive or dead before an observation occurs. Once a human being is kind enough to check in with the cat and open the box, its wave function collapses and one outcome is revealed: dead or alive.

Even when it’s outside of that box, this cat by itself has no property if it’s not interacting with anything. The property of the cat relative to something that is interacting with it is very different from another thing that is interacting with it in a different way. I see a cat on the street, I’m percieving it differently from a mouse that’s being eaten by the cat (funny example is stolen from Carlo Rovelli). I hope this example is obvious enough to see how much we, as human beings, behave like a single atom in the box or a cat in another box.

The physics of interactions is easy to understand as it lies in the core of our nature as human beings. Let’s take you as an example: you present yourself differently when you’re with your family, your partner, a friend, another friend, your coworkers, your boss, etc. We’re a collection or the result of everything we’ve ever interacted with in our life, that’s how we build an imperssion or a character. There’s no person, or a cat, in itself without any possible interaction. David Hume’s approach to personal identity is very similar. Hume thinks that identity is confound with relation, and dependent on impressions — those impressions are never unchanging and invariable.

To conclude this section, I’d like to quote Nihal Arthanayake’s remixed version of the famous “I think, therefore I am”: I am, because you think.

There’s an atom, a cat, and you passing all together in the network of interactions…

On Uncertainty

"We never have total certainty, nor do we need it — or want it. Between full ignorance and total certainty there is a vast intermediate space where we conduct our lives." -Carlo Rovelli

Uncertainty is inevitable — even if we very deeply believe in something (let that be religion, evolution, or someone), we can’t be fully certain about its behavior, intention, or actions. Yet it’s not necessary that our beliefs are affected by the overwhelming amount of uncertainty in this world — they can remain absolutely solid in such a world. While uncertainty in many aspects of our lives is uncomfortable, curious sicentists have found the beauty in uncertainty and praised it— and others romanticized it in their daily life and relationships.

The gift of uncertainty, besides bringing excitment and novelty, can bring the best out of a person, as a scientist or as a whole human being in general. Questioning scientific conclusions leaves room for revisions and further improvements, or questioning your career choices can make you look futher into better places for your future self. Without uncertainty, we’d have neither emotional nor intellectual fulfillments. Now, Let’s dive deeper into and be more specific:

In epistemology, we recognize that we can’t be certain about any scientific statement and that all our beliefs hold different degrees of certainty. Therefore, science aims to empirically test our beliefs. When are our beliefs are sufficiently tested, this warrants our accepting them as scientific facts. However, we should always remember how bounded our knowledge of the physical world is no matter how rigorous and numerous our experiments and theoritical reasonings are. That’s why Richard Feynman once said: “What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth”.

Scientists have found a way to cope with uncertainty when dealing with theories and scientific concepts: reliability. The next important question here is what brings reliability into scienctific theories, or into our daily life?

I’ll start from quantum mechanics before going into our daily human life experience: a system has no objective reality. What we learn about systems is mainly through repeated observations which becomes a sum of experiences, rather than a reality. After several repeated observations, results become predictable and have some degree of certainty depending on how many observations we’ve done and what results we’ve gotten. Once the observations and all equations work beautifully together to build a coherent story or an explanation to a phenomena, scientists can say that it’s definitely reliable, but they can’t be totally certain about it.

Whichever system we’re talking about, it will remain unknowable and mysterious until you bring it out for observation — this is very much like our intentions and actions as human beings in some sense. The presentation of our intentions, reality, is unknowable — while what we do in our actions is what can be observed about us and make us reliable.

Through repeated observations of a system, through watching the sunrise every single day, through recieving affectionate gestures from a beloved one repeatedly, we can state that something is reliable and more probable to happen.

In a cloud chamber, you see beautiful bright white tracks of charged particles looking like airplanes’ contrails on the blue skies. These chambers are used to detect ionising particles in order to determine their properties and identities. Keep in mind that you cannot see the particles, only the tracks they leave behind in the black observation area. Every single cloud track is as unique as a fingerprint. From a particle’s unique track, you can determine its properties, what caused it, and its origin sometimes.

Contemplating this point makes me think of how small I am or my track is in comparison to the infinitely enormous number of tracks left in this universe. We’re, not in a melancholic way, very small beings in the vastness of nowhere in space and time — and perhaps we’re not significantly visible, but we hope that the track that we leave behind is, just like the white tracks seen in cloud chambers.

Tracks in a cloud chamber, Cavendish Laboratory