The Physics of Modern Crisis

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The Physics of Modern Crisis Animesh
Mukherjee Roll 05CS9405
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Statutory Warning The speaker is neither a
Physicist nor a Philosopher!
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• Crisis Crisis Everywhere
• History makes it evident that
• The last two/three decades have witnessed a
  state of profound worldwide crisis
• The crisis is multidimensional, encompassing
• Health,
• Environment,
• Social relationships,
• Economy and Politics, and even
• Moral and Spiritual values
• For the first time the most intelligent beings
  on this earth are threatened of extinction

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• Reasons The Nuclear Madness
• Nuclear Weapons Oh, we have enough to destroy
  the world several times
• 3rd world countries do business of military
  equipments more than their national income
• A bit of statistics
• 15 million people (mostly children) die of
  starvation
• 500 million are undernourished
• 40 of the world population hardly know the term
  Health Service
• Surprisingly, 50 of the world engineers and
  scientists spend their life in making more
  deadly weapons

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• Give it a Thought!
• PENTAGON (US military industry)
• Constantly persuades all other countries to buy
  more and more nuclear weapons
• A really funny ideology
• THE MORE WEAPONED YOU ARE THE MORE SAFER YOU
  WILL BE
• Hence the age old idea of
• ATOMS FOR PEACE is now a painful
• reality

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• What Experts Say??
• NOTHING
• - A striking sign of our times
• Experts fail to deal with urgent problems even
  in their own fields
• In 1979 the Washington Post ran a story under
• the heading The Cupboard of Ideas is Bare
• In this the prominent thinkers round the world
  admitted that they are unable to solve nations
  most policy problems

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• Why is this failure??
• Probably because
• - Solutions were local and lacked a narrow
  perception of reality
• No holistic view, even though the problems were
  systematic and closely interconnected
• Its high time to get rid of the concept of
  static societal structure and believe in the
  dynamic patterns of change

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• The Way to Analysis
• Crisis and change share a historical
  relationship
• Chinese philosophers use the term wei-ji for
  crisis which means danger followed by
  opportunity
• Crisis leads to cultural transformation
  necessary for the development of a civilization

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• The Challenge and Response
• The genesis of civilization is a pattern of
  interaction probably like the game of cards
• Toynbee identified this fact and called it the
  Challenge-and-Response in A Study of History

Challenge
Response
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• Rise and Fall
• Challenge from the social and natural
• environment provokes a creative response
• Induces the society to enter into a process of
  new civilization
• This response generates cultural momentum and
• takes the society beyond an equilibrium a new
• challenge
• The initial pattern is again repeated

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For Whom the Bell Tolls
Growth of civilization as a result of a creative
response
Decline of civilization as a result of a new
challenge

• Growing civilization Versatility Variety
• Disintegrating Civilization Rigid lacks
  inventiveness

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• Yin and Yang
• Numerous philosophers observed this
• recurrent rhythm of cultural growth
• Ancient Chinese Yin and Yang (two opposite
  polar forces)
• Ancient Indians Prakriti Purusha
• Saint Simon Organic and Critical
• Herbert Spencer Integrations and
  Differentiations
• Henceforth we will use the terms Yin and
• Yang

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• Transitions of Our Times
• Reluctant but inevitable decline of Patriarchy
• End of fossil fuel age and the beginning of
• renewable energy age
• Change in value system (Sorokin)
• Sensate Matter alone is ultimate reality
• Ideational Absolute Spiritualism (beyond the
  realm of the material world)
• Ideal Intermediate between Ideational and
  Sensate

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Dos and Don'ts

• Since such a cultural transformation cannot be
  prevented so,
• They should not be opposed but welcomed mainly
  to escape agony
• During the change reject the conceptual models
  that are obsolete in current scenario
• Recognize new values that were once discarded

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Can Physics Help Us ??

• Newtonian Physics
• Perhaps not
• Mainly due to the reductionist viewpoint which
  believes
• Any complex phenomenon can be reduced to some
  basic building blocks and then analyzed
  independently
• - Most of the other sciences (e.g., psychology,
  sociology, economics) are biased towards
  Newtonian concepts

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The Systems View

• Modern Physics
• Yes
• Mainly by introduction of a holistic framework
• This branch of modern Physics is well known as
  the Systems Theory

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The Cultural Dynamics What Systems Theory has to
say??
Demanding
Contractive
Aggressive
Responsive
YANG
Competitive
YIN
Cooperative
Intuitive
Rational
Synthesizing
Analytic

• YIN YANG Properties of living organisms,
  society, ecosystem
• More specifically Two parts of the same human
  nature
• One asserting the self ego-system
• The other integrating with the society
  eco-system

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The Forces of Dynamics Altogether
F4
F5

• Any guess about the forces!!
• F1, F2, F3 - Ideal, Sensate, Ideational
  respectively
• F4, F5 Yin, Yang respectively

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To Conclude

• Other sciences should,
• Accept the new concepts of Physics
• Believe in the holistic framework
• Base their analysis on this framework
• In short it should mark THE TURNING POINT of
  science
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  - Thanks