Newton’s First Law

---Warning: The following post is even less relevant to actual life than the standard you may have come to expect from this blog.---

The problem with physics is that as soon as you vaguely understand something it turns out to be wrong, and to understand the updated theory you need to master some mind-bendingly difficult new type of mathematics. Somewhere along the line in this process I suspect that physicists themselves have actually lost track of trying to make sense of the world and have basically accepted that the maths is as good as their theories will get. A few thousand years ago, physics worked like this:

Layman: I dropped a biscuit on a rock and it broke in two. Explain this to me, wise and noble physicist.

Physicist: Hmmm, physics isn’t likely to be invented for some time. In the absence of a real explanation, I’m going with “God probably doesn’t like your biscuit”.

Of course, as time went by and people got more and more into inventing things, someone realised that without physics no one would ever invent the ski-doo. With this motivation in mind people got stuck into physics. As such, a bit over a hundred years ago physics worked like this:

Layman: I dropped a biscuit on a rock and it broke in two. Explain this to me, wise and noble physicist.

Physicist: Gravity pulled the biscuit into the rock, and the energy of the collision broke your biscuit in two. Here’s a detailed and effective mathematic description of the whole shebang.

This is pretty much enough physics to invent the ski-doo, and that has kept people happy for a long time. After all, having a ski-doo is basically the best thing that can happen to you. However, someone got it into their head that they wanted a ski-doo that could solve the reverse phone book problem in a computationally efficient way, so physicists had to work out quantum mechanics. This resulted in a new type of physical explanation.

Layman: I dropped a biscuit on a rock and it broke in two. Explain this to me, wise and noble physicist.

Physicist: Well, there’s a biscuit, see. And a rock. And quantum mechanics something something something.

The frustrating part of this new type of physics is that it doesn’t actually explain anything. The old physics was wonderfully intuitive and made sense to people. It was all about pushing and pulling and colliding and other tragic accidents that happened to people’s ex-wives. The new physics was all about equations and waves and particles and stuff people didn’t really care about. Physicists might claim to understand these things in a way that makes “quantum mechanics something something something” a sensible explanation, but I reckon they’ve basically substituted explaining how things happen for mathematical descriptions of what’s just about to happen. Physicists will probably deny this, but baseless slander is a big part of what this blog is about, so let’s not think too hard about that. Anyway, by this stage physics was on a roll. Nowadays physicists explain things like this:

Layman: I dropped a laboured example on a rock and it broke in two. Explain this to me man who wears shorts with large pockets to work in every season.

Physicist: In order to answer this question I will need a significantly larger and more expensive machine than anyone in the world currently has. Until I own the largest and shiniest machine known to humankind I will be unable to assist you.

The moral to this story is that reading this blog is a complete waste of your time. It is, however, vaguely relevant to my current situation. You see, Newton’s First Law of Motion is that any body will continue to move at a constant velocity (or remain at rest) unless acted on by a force. That is, stuff tends to keep doing what it’s doing unless there’s a good reason for it do something else.

Tonight, as I mark the end of my third week in White Star Chalet, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on the truth of Newton’s First Law, despite the dubious improvements of physics since the time of the old dodger.

The first week of my time here was Oldies Week, which was too good to miss. Then we got a few nights of snow and clear days which made for skiing too good to miss. After that I really intended to go to Mt Olympus, I really did. But then I got the plague, and spent a few days fevering it up and manufacturing vast quantities of gratuitous mucus. I got that out of the way, but I didn’t eat much during that time and it stretched out my food supplies, so I stayed up here until my food ran out. Then I had to come back because there was a BBQ cook-off competition that sounded fun, and now I can’t leave because I’ve somehow ended up being hut mum for a bunch of high school kids from Queensland on a school camp.

I had great intentions, but somehow it just didn’t work out. At least now I’m being honest. Now when people ask how long I’ll be here and I say “Well, my flight out is on the 4^th of October”. It may not be pretty, but it closely approximates being honest.