The Physics of Modern Crisis

Animesh Mukherjee

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Statutory Warning…

The speaker is neither a Physicist nor a Philosopher!

Crisis Crisis Everywhere…• History makes it evident that

- The last two/three decades have witnessed a state of profound worldwide crisis

- The crisis is multidimensional, encompassing

Health,

Environment,

Social relationships,

Economy and Politics, and even

Moral and Spiritual values

• For the first time the most intelligent beings on this earth are threatened of extinction

Reasons: The Nuclear Madness• Nuclear Weapons – Oh, we have enough to destroy the world several times

• 3rd world countries do business of military equipments more than their national income

-A bit of statistics

15 million people (mostly children) die of starvation

500 million are undernourished

40% of the world population hardly know the term “Health Service”

• Surprisingly, 50% of the world engineers and scientists spend their life in making “more deadly weapons”

Give it a Thought!

• PENTAGON (US military industry)

- Constantly persuades all other countries to buy more and more nuclear weapons

A really funny ideology

“THE MORE WEAPONED YOU ARE THE MORE SAFER YOU WILL BE”

• Hence the age old idea of

“ATOMS FOR PEACE” – is now a painful

reality

What Experts Say??

• NOTHING

- A striking sign of our times

Experts fail to deal with urgent problems even in their own fields

• In 1979 the Washington Post ran a story under

the heading “The Cupboard of Ideas is Bare”

In this the prominent thinkers round the world admitted that they are unable to solve nation’s most policy problems

Why is this failure??

• Probably because

- Solutions were local and lacked a narrow perception of reality

-No holistic view, even though the problems were systematic and closely interconnected

• Its high time to get rid of the concept of static societal structure and believe in the dynamic patterns of change

The Way to Analysis

• Crisis and change share a historical relationship

• Chinese philosophers use the term ‘wei-ji’ for crisis which means “danger followed by opportunity”

• Crisis leads to cultural transformation necessary for the development of a civilization

The Challenge and Response

• The genesis of civilization is a pattern of interaction – probably like the game of cards

• Toynbee identified this fact and called it the “Challenge-and-Response” in “A Study of History”

Challenge

Response

Rise and Fall

• Challenge from the social and natural

environment provokes a creative response

- Induces the society to enter into a process of new civilization

• This response generates cultural momentum and

takes the society beyond an equilibrium – a new

challenge

• The initial pattern is again repeated

For Whom the Bell Tolls…

Growth of civilization as a result of a creative response

Decline of civilization as a result of a new challenge

• Growing civilization – Versatility & Variety

• Disintegrating Civilization – Rigid & lacks inventiveness

Yin and Yang• Numerous philosophers observed this

recurrent rhythm of cultural growth

Ancient Chinese – Yin and Yang (two opposite polar forces)

Ancient Indians – Prakriti & Purusha

Saint Simon – Organic and Critical

Herbert Spencer – Integrations and Differentiations

• Henceforth we will use the terms Yin and

Yang

Transitions of Our Times

• Reluctant but inevitable decline of Patriarchy

• End of fossil fuel age and the beginning of

renewable energy age

• Change in value system (Sorokin)

Sensate – Matter alone is ultimate reality

Ideational – Absolute Spiritualism (beyond the realm of the material world)

Ideal – Intermediate between Ideational and Sensate

Do’s and Don'ts

• Since such a cultural transformation cannot be prevented so,

They should not be opposed but welcomed – mainly to escape agony

During the change reject the conceptual models that are obsolete in current scenario

Recognize new values that were once discarded

Can Physics Help Us ??

• Newtonian Physics

- Perhaps not

- Mainly due to the reductionist viewpoint which believes Any complex phenomenon can be reduced to

some basic building blocks and then analyzed independently

- Most of the other sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, economics) are biased towards Newtonian concepts

The Systems View

• Modern Physics

- Yes

- Mainly by introduction of a holistic framework

- This branch of modern Physics is well known as the “Systems Theory”

The Cultural Dynamics: What Systems Theory has to say??

YIN YANG

Contractive

Responsive

Cooperative

Intuitive

Synthesizing

Demanding

Aggressive

Rational

Analytic

Competitive

• YIN & YANG – Properties of living organisms, society, ecosystem ……

• More specifically – Two parts of the same human nature

One asserting the self – ego-system

The other integrating with the society – eco-system

The Forces of Dynamics AltogetherF1

F2 F3

F4 F5

• Any guess about the forces!!

F1, F2, F3 - Ideal, Sensate, Ideational respectively

F4, F5 – Yin, Yang respectively

To Conclude …

• Other sciences should,

- Accept the new concepts of Physics

- Believe in the holistic framework

- Base their analysis on this framework

• In short : it should mark “THE TURNING POINT” of science

- Thanks