I’d like to add one more. Ideas are like electrons. Electrons are notorious for their random velocity with ‘zero’ displacement over time and do not drift/move in a particular direction untill there is some bias.
You are biased! One often hears it now and then. This is another curious this to say since everyone is biased. Ideas and electron can not move in a direction unless there is bias. Bigger the bias, longer the movement. If a person is super-biased, Like Marx, Gandhi, Vivekananda, Keynes, Wittgenstein etc, ideas behaves like hot-electrons under large bias. A hot electron when collides with crystal (which does not like to change, like society) stresses it, creates secondary electrons, rebounds, sometimes falls into traps and holes and fill neutralise them. Strong Ideas do the same, stresses the society, creates more ideas, rebounds, and sometimes falls in to traps and holes. One thing I like to clarify here that ‘charge-carriers’ are always of the same polarity. ‘Hole’ is an absence of electrons. They are myth to make students easily understand the understandable.
Having established it, I’d like to add that Ideas and Electrons can never get annihilated after falling into holes or traps. In traps, they’d create stress. In holes, they’d neutralise it. So other electrons can move forward. One can not hold strong-ideas in oneself, just hot-electron can not be hold at a particular place, even in quantum dot . Or roughly, if your are in CMOS, this is equivalent to say that ‘source'(in FET) can not hold electrons when there is bias. Same way, one needs to spit ideas out even when the cost of doing is very high – Socrates drinking poison or Bhagat Singh being hanged. If you want to trap ideas, it will stress you. It will make you made. If you will let them out, society will stress you. No one likes abrupt change. Inertia is the Nature though they say that ‘change’ is nature. Perhaps this change is to make inertia more permanent. Thermodynamics teaches us the all natural process minimizes energy. Without energy there would be no motion. A complete still. Chaotic yet perfect. So I refuse to believe that change is nature! Chaos is in nature! A chaos that does not change is nature. Otherwise why every natural phenomenon tries to minimizes energy. This is the ultimate aim of this world. To be at still, to be at peace with no change.
You’d like to argue that energy is constant, even if it is minimised in one phenomenon then it will be added to some other phenomenon. No, energy is not constant. Its mass and energy combined which are constant. Energy will change in to mass, which is by its very nature, has inertia.
But why would this universe, by big-bang or whatever means, started its journey if ultimately it had to be the still again. Why a cycle appears to repeat itself. Answering this could be as mysterious as mystery itself or as simple as the case of simple loop. First you need to believe that there is life, or say consciousness. But ideas in you comes to still; you have no idea at all. Wouldn’t your conscious explode? Perhaps the ultimate still-chaos is the most unstable? That indeed is a tough question, why something happens to meet the same end again and again.
Lets come back to our previous case. Bhagat Singh famously said that, “Bomb and pistol do not make revolutions, ideas do…” That seems to be so true, You never see a gun in the hand of the secretary of Maoist. It does not mean that He do not know what to do with it. Their sympathizers also do no carry weapons still they were the first one to get arrested. May be perhaps, Osama Bin Laden posing with gun is only symbolic. He might have not fired it on anyone after he took the prominent position. So ideas are most dangerous. They precedes actions.
Ok, our electron and ideas! There is no similarity between highly charged ideas and charged electrons for electron have a constant charge. But there is a catch. It is the misuse of the words. Charge is something which convey current. Though their are both positive and negative and annihilates each other after attracting each other but this does not happen in case of ideas. If we assume that ideas are also ‘charged’ then they must annihilate each others for they are of equal and of opposite nature. BUT NO TWO IDEAS DESTROY EACH OTHER. They may produce other ideas and release some energy as ‘debate’ after their collision. So we see they can not be differently charged if they are charged. Like electrons they must have a single character of charge. (By the way, in English language, first it was ‘hot’ which was hot. Then the word ‘sexy’ became hot. now its ‘cool’ which is hot. — W Saffire, The english Language.)
Ever wonder, why there are some books which are your favorite. Actually your favorite books tell you the same things which you already knew in some way or other. These books will put these ideas in an impressive order and may use language in a wonderful way to remove your doubts. So if this is true, favorite books are not good books if you want to increase your dictionary of ideas. Read the ideas you hate and your bias will go down, if you want to be least biased. But again if you are not biased then you are at ‘zero’ potential, others would like to calibrate their bias with respect to you. In other words, “You head will become that much open that your brain might fall out.” Its nothing wrong being biased. Neither it is bad to be a ‘ground’ potential. What is bad is not letting your ideas to be known to this world.
But ‘being biased’ is considered bad? Expressing yourself might influence others. It might be good or bad to influence others in short time. But this is how knowledge is refined. This is how progress is done in scholarships, and as a aftereffect, ensues progress in society.. Take for instance, Primates, they have all the tools to build a language. But still they have not built a significant-language. It is argued that they did not care to develop language for they do not recognize that others have thoughts and they can influence them. Just wonder, in spite of colossal benefits (yes, they also do politics.).
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Dilawar