About the simplicity of the description of facts

By Pablo MP

 

We often ignore the simplest way, perhaps only to be surprised when we take it. It is often so trivial that rejection is unconscious. We decide unintentionally, that multiple disjointed explanations of facts are more satisfactory than the underlying platitudes of the set of phenomena that we attempt to understand. It happened some days ago that a group of acquaintances came to me alarmed and astonished by the fact that two lemons, that several minutes ago had been thrown to the sea with a gap of a few inches between them, still remained floating with the same separation. There was a debate about the mysterious force that could be holding them apart. It needed to be of such a nature that it cancelled the tireless tendency of the citrus fruits to joint. Nature was becoming unpredictable and it was challenging the common sense of the alarmed audience of another one of her games. It was causing surprise to those who could only be amazed by a novelty, of those who had forgotten very soon that things such as fruits, pens and planets keep doing whatever they were doing until something interferes in their way. The lemons’ path was only disturbed, almost equally, by some gusts of wind and some waves that were not breaking. It was impossible that they could have approached or moved away in a noticeable distance. That would have been surprising and alarming.

I have run into the challenge, in numerous occasions, of ascertaining what underlying and more general explanation clarifies the collection of phenomena that often arises, that is connected in a suspicious way, but it is also wisely disguised. From the most humane problems to the most natural mysteries, they all conceal, from my own personal experience, a simpler and more general explanation that makes life a more rational and understandable experience for those of us who don’t have the slightest idea of what is all about. Examples such as the fact that bulbs, microwaves, common ovens, the resistance of a bridge, the transparency of a glass, fires, chemical reactions, magnets, electricity, car engines, aircraft engines, sound, computers, the Internet, prisms and springs, all of them so different apparently, have their fundamental description based on three very simple actions: a photon goes from one place to another, a charge goes from one place to another, a photon is absorbed or emitted by a charge, is one more proof of how simple things seem to be the machinery of complex things.

 

I will not keep on going giving demonstrations of how simple ideas can explain a collection of different phenomena, for it is a fact so habitual that it is not worth investing either your time or mine in reasserting it; it is more convenient that you observe for your self what is going on out there. Nevertheless, I would like to encourage you to try to be as imaginative as you can, to ask yourself as much things as you can and to not stop being curious as to what happens in front of your eyes when you are looking somewhere else, because it is life and as I have already told you, it is not as complicated as it seems to be.