Find x

I wrote this essay in 15 minutes in response to the Chicago University’s application supplementary essay question.  I didn’t apply in the end (I was lucky and got into my ED school) so this article dwelt in some corner of my HDD. Re-read it today I find it messy, but there are smart ideas which should be better polished and connected.

Here it goes.

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There must be some neat quality to the system. Language, numbers, locations, Cartesian’s coordinates, Newton’s Three Law of motions, virtues, government laws, metaphysical forces, as pillars of the technology, society and humanity. Each person has his position in the assembly line of functioning of today’s world, his role distributed and defined. Deviance within certain a range is allowed while blatant outliers shall be eliminated.

These are clues to find x, the position of any unit within the system. But can we find x if the system is gone?

I always hear the sound of the systems shattering, twisting, and collapsing. When Einstein’s theory of relativity was first published, it revolutionized people’s views about time ever after. Time is relative. People were so scared – if time can’t be trusted, what else can we trust?

Scientists and mathematics are so eagerly to discover the order of this world, yet the deeper they delve into, the more uncertainties and fractures they find. Schrödinger equation shows that particle can jump across impossible (as we used to think) energy barriers. In quantum physics, everything is just a probability. The order of the world we so much depend on is overthrown. Can we find the object x if its mass is converted into energy and time and length are distorted? Can we locate the position x of an electron between two energy layers? What if all my parents and friends one day are teletransported into another parallel universe, can I find the way to find them?

If we were sent to the beginning of the world where “the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep”, where all the systems were no longer present, could we find anything? Would we know what we were about to find?

The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking… the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.

–        Einstein

In the heart of mankind. We know we want to find some x. The impulse drives us on. It is how man finds things he seek from the primitive chaos on our blue planet. It is the consistent thinking and exploring, even when he did not know what exactly is to be found and where to find it. From where there was no law, no number, and no language, man bricks after bricks construct into today’s civilization, having found what they once wanted to find, and on the way to find the next x they want to know. Systems and beliefs collapse and reemerge, driving the never-ceased cycle of humanity. A miracle, a myth of x. About to be found.