Activation Energy

Sometimes things need to get worse before they get better. Sometimes things need to get messier before they become clear. Sometimes you need an initial push to get the car out of the ditch.

There’s a strange concept that appears throughout our little worldly universe. It seems that in order to understand something new, or to achieve something new, we must disrupt the status quo. We must mess up the existing structure to a sufficient degree such that it is malleable enough to take on a new and distinct form.

Have you ever tried organising your room? The most efficient way is often to remove all of the furniture, and decompose the room into its bare structural components, and then rearrange the components from scratch. If we try to do this instead by moving one piece of furniture at a time, then things get in the way of each other: the pieces of furniture interfere with each other’s movement.

The same thing happens when we try to understand new things: we sometimes need to allow ourselves to be confused, before we can achieve clarity. If we try to understand everything by trying to compress it into the frame of things we have understood in the past, then we are not really learning anything new, we are just stamp collecting. As the famous physicist Ernest Rutherford said:

” All science is either physics, or stamp collecting. “

What he meant by this statement is that there are ideas that change the playing field, and there are are confirmations of the status quo (evidence). In order to achieve real progress in science, we have to be willing to sacrifice our reliance on what will ultimately be temporary theoretical frameworks to prop us up while we search for better ones. Even general relativity may one day be found to have been a convenient way of describing events given humanity’s contemporary understanding of the universe. I am not saying general relativity is “wrong”, but there will be better theories to come from the perspective of science.

Activation energy is a final example of this phenomenon, giving this post the title it has: sometimes in order to reach a lower stable state, we must first inject energy into a system, making it more disordered from the entropic perspective in thermodynamics, before it reaches the top of the energy hill and rolls down into the lower, more ordered and less entropic state.

We cannot let our assumptions and current frame of mind interfere with the malleability of new ideas. We should try to approach the learning of new things from as fresh a perspective as possible. It might be harder in the sort term, but in the long term we will greatly decrease the amount of energy we need to spend to achieve clarity.