The physics of life

Physics, as I have blogged here, was my first intellectual love.  Once, in a school exam in which we had a choice to omit a question, I answered all the questions because, well, I really, really liked the subject ;) 

Any teacher could have tossed me any number of questions on the content and I would have been the happiest trying to answer them all. 

When handing the exam papers back to us, the physics teacher, Vasudevan, commented about this in front of the entire class!

Physics explained a lot around me, above me, and underneath too.

Of course, I was far more interested in the human problems that were all around, and with every passing month I was rapidly losing my interest in the sciences.

While some may claim that the era of physics ruling the intellectual world is over, and biology is the twenty-first century leader, the big and urgent question of the day is all about physics.  Bill McKibben summarizes it well in the context of climate change and hurricanes: "You can’t beat physics."

If there’s more heat, the hurricane can get stronger. Physics. Warm air can hold more water than cold air can. So in warm, arid areas you get more evaporation, and hence more drought, and hence more fire. Physics. The water that’s been evaporated into the atmosphere comes down: more flooding rainfall. Physics. The earth runs on energy. We’re trapping more of it near the planet’s surface because of the carbon dioxide that comes from burning coal and gas and oil. That energy expresses itself in melting ice sheets, in rising seas, in the incomprehensible roar of the wind as a giant storm crashes into a city of steel and glass. It’s not, in the end, all that complicated.

It is not that complicated, and we have also known this for quite some time now.

McKibben ends that essay with the following lines:

Physics doesn’t compromise or negotiate or hold back. Physics just is. It’s entirely up to us to understand and live within the limits it sets.

Physics can also be life-giving in many ways.  Subodh Patil writes in Nautilus about how physics saved him during a troubling six-month period of his life.

What could have ended up as a crippling dysfunction in any other incarnation turned out to be my survival kit, not just in life, but in my chosen craft.

I wonder if my old friend still thinks about the physics road from which he has now traveled far away.