Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Newton and me

Being a geek I always trusted science for explanations and luckily enough, it never let me down until ….

In eighth standard, Newton suggested that everything attracts every other thing with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and since then I tried to explain all sorts of attraction on the basis of the law. Based on this law, I used to develop my own corollaries like two fat people would fall in love quicker than two normal people. Even as a kid, I knew something was wrong with my corollary. I used to blame surrounding conditions for my failure as I knew all physics rules are made only for carrying out experiments in perfect space with ideal conditions. Concept of “Zero figure” almost shattered my whole proposition and made me think, how someone’s loosing weight can make Saif Ali Khan dribble, even in his old age. That was the first blow to my deep faith in science.

In eleventh standard, my physics teacher told us that “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. From childhood I have been experimental by nature. So, I decided to test the theory. I punched the guy sitting next to me in the class. Next thing I realized was, you certainly get an opposite reaction but I was not so sure about the “equal” part of the theory. To me, it was many times the action force I had applied. But I was happy that at least half of the theory could be proven even in practical condition.

This was the same year I started feeling different about her. Only rational explanation I could think of was that, I was feeling her gravitational pull. Answer raised couple of more questions; why only now, why not earlier? And why I do not feel the same pull for my best friend or as matter anyone else? I am not good with senses. My five receptors do not work that well. So it was a good news that my antenna was at least catching one signal. Her signal had certainly (must have) strengthened with development of her body (increased weight?). Rest became clear when I learned Coulomb’s law of attraction. Only opposite charges attract each other. That was a great relief as I only had to expect signals from half of the population. May be with time I will catch more signals from different ones.

I must say, gravitational pull is very strong pull. I could feel her existence even when she was away.  I thought to test my 11th standard learning again. I thought, this is time to take action to get a reaction. I wrote her a letter and placed it in her notebook.

For 2 days there was no reaction and I wondered which external factor has introduced lag in the response. I kept searching my notebooks for letter. Finally on the third day I got response, not from her, but by her brother, very strong one. After that suddenly all gravitational pull was gone and I reached to the decision that some actions do have severe reaction.

Ultimately I concluded, may be love is not governed by laws of physics. Love is the most irrational concept. It is not absolute like science and that’s why people have different preferences; some like cars and some beautiful models around them. Somebody needs to write a book on theories of love so that geeks like me who like reading theories and applying them can be benefitted.