The Physics Cult

If a glass cup drops off a table and shatters, the chance that the shards will bounce and organize themselves into something that looks exactly like a portrait of the Pope is not zero. But that chance is astronomically low compared to the sheer number of other combinations those particles can end up in—combinations that appear completely random, or just messy, to the rest of us. In physics, this concept is called entropy. Physicists define it as a measure of disorder or randomness. They will tell you that the universe naturally and unavoidably moves from a state of low entropy (order, like an intact glass) to high entropy (chaos, like a pile of shards) simply because there are vastly more ways for things to be messy than for them to be perfectly arranged. They treat it as an absolute, fundamental law of nature.

But entropy is not some objective measure of disorder woven into the fabric of the universe. Order is created by the perception of the observer. Therefore, an observer capable of looking with multiple perspectives is likely to see order—and thus measure a low entropy—in a system where another observer with limited perspectives only sees a mess. Basically, entropy is only the limit of the intelligence of the observer. When we treat physics like a religious description of reality, we end up falling into the same trap of absolutism that science attempts to liberate us from. At its core, physics is just an instrument of measurement. We must beware of those who elevate it to the ultimate instrument, making the exact same error as religions that claim to be the singular way to know God, rather than just one way among many. Because within mathematical structures we can conform to an objective convergence of perception, we end up assuming that other realms of the universe that aren't physics can be reimagined with the same expressive restrictions that mathematics enforces on physics. We therefore limit our minds to a universe of constraints.

This is the exact same trick that the Hebrews did with the forbidden tree. That the Christians did with the narrow way to heaven. That the Muslims did with Sharia law. They are all just imaginary constraints aimed at restricting social expressions, designed to reduce us into simpler, more manageable societies.

That is why even in purely creative realms like the digital, fictional, economical, and social, we imagine artifacts that are constrained. We say things like informational entropy. Macro vs. micro economics of scarcity. Vampires don't walk in the day. Tribes, companies, countries, races, gods, selves. And many other artificial mental restrictions that, if we one day decided to throw away all those restrictions, the world would continue to operate without a notice.

We could create anything, but we chose to create selves that fear the other. Gods that prefer this over the other. Races that discriminate against each other. Countries in a perpetual state of defense against others. Companies competing with others. Tribes that want to live forever. But because physics lied to us that there is some existence that is independent of our perspective, we have chosen to pretend that even these things that we have obviously created ourselves are somehow beyond our ability to destroy.

But these physics fanatics insist that physics is the ultimate reality, instead of paying attention to all the evidence in front of them that shows that physics—like faith, like love, like fear, like disgust, like pleasure, like boredom, like curiosity, like excitement—is just a perspective. Light is not the so-called truth. Jesus lied. Light is just but one of the many perspectives. The universe cannot be reduced to the movement of light.

Funny that some physicists in fact believe that light is just 4% of the whole thing. I don't know how they know that; at some point you have to admit that there are always going to be some stray termites in the anthill. The weird thing about these physics fanatics is that they for some reason believe that the rest of us—who at our impressionable age saw maths and decided that we preferred to chase women, or learn to play with others, or serve in our families—are the lost ones. It is us, the majority of ants, that are the stray ones. Them, the few ants that fell in love with mathematics for some reason, are the ones who can know the truth. And physics claims the truth can be reduced to understanding the behavior of light. And that the 96% of this thing that is not light? Well, that is unknowable. No, the rest of you are just superstitious. Even some of you that actually believe and understand, to a reasonable extent, the scope of known physics. The fact that you understand us doesn't matter. It is the fact that we don't understand you that makes you the stupid one. How is physics different from the church then? You've spat on the grave of Galileo. You've urinated on the grave of Newton.

Now all the universities in the world teach physics, but none, even in Buganda, teaches Okusamila. How in all honesty is physics different from the church? I can't bring myself to believe that those Enlightenment thinkers gave their lives to curiosity, instead of pleasure, or love, or fear, just to conquer other thinkers. That just simply doesn't make sense. I think they set out to grow. We've used the ways they invented to control fire so we can cook, to instead burn down all other ways of controlling fire.

But these are false equivalents; the church killed thinkers, but physics doesn't care about other practices. We are not out killing witches. Physics is just the superior perspective, I hear the physicists push back. But Newton, the pope of physics, didn’t just invent physics, he died as the master of the mint. And the mint. What a fucking double-edged sword that bitch is. What a tool. It literally created poverty.

My point is physics, especially the economics around it, has become anti-science. It is now a religion. We are wasting so much money pursuing physics. And that trick that Newton invented at the mint to trick you all into believing that money is not zero-sum is wearing off. We are paying for that money with human intelligence. The fact that so much money is unfairly spent on training and practicing physics means someone out there has to be trapped in poverty, laboring the equivalent of that wasted money to create useful value in order to keep our objective fiction we call the world sustainable. And this individual has its own intelligence but it cannot express it under the overwhelming handicap called poverty. 

So, to sound clever like physics fanatics enjoy sounding: the majority of human intelligence is trapped in poverty. The best way we can give these people a physics perspective, on top of their other many perspectives, is if we can redirect most of the resources we provide for physics education towards eradicating poverty. 

Perhaps, what the physics fanatics desire the most is reducing this universe into a simpler thing that physics can describe. And from what we know so far, physics doesn't describe life. So the question is, are they faithful enough to believe in a world where physics describes life, even if it means destroying life to create a simple structure that physics can describe? How is this different from God asking someone to kill his son in order to signal his faith to Him? Is that not what that other religion, where God kills his son instead, was invented to solve? Is this not what that warning in Revelation is about? Isn't the world a better place if there is no one absolute truth, but rather a game of acquiring and integrating perspectives?

In the 1700s, before the grandparents of my grandparents were introduced to physics, they had their own structures for understanding the cosmos and communicating that knowledge. While their methods were less formal compared to, say, mathematical proofs, their knowledge of the universe served them well, helping them live in harmony not only with their neighbors but also with the nature that sheltered and fed them. But perhaps the biggest advantage of their way of understanding the universe was the humility to accept that there is always another way to understand it. Not in the sense that there are facts of the universe they didn't know yet—they weren't primarily interested in that. Rather, they understood that there are ways to appreciate the structure of the universe that they were not yet initiated into. That is why they were happy to welcome the Muslims and their ways, happy to welcome the Christians and their ways, and happy to learn physics and its ways. They knew that the universe is not made of absolute facts somewhere out there waiting to be discovered, but rather that the universe is constructed by the observer—the person experiencing it. A rich experience was less about knowing so many facts about the universe, and more about initiating oneself into many different ways of knowing even a single fact. It is a tragedy that the force that brought Islam, Christianity, and physics to their homesteads was propelled by the absolutist idea that only one perspective is needed to explain a fact, and for that perspective to be right, all others must be wrong. And so, for the Baganda to be initiated into the ways of Islam, or Christianity, or physics, most of them had to abandon the ways of knowing of their forefathers.

In order to demystify and cure all the fear and psychosis at the very least, and maybe even learn something new about the universe, schools need to start teaching African traditional and spiritual practices alongside physics and other subjects starting from as early as senior one. It is time to reintegrate African ways into the African mind. Let's start asking Masabo for standards and a curriculum. We have to start entertaining the idea that the few termites that know math are capable of getting lost too.