F = ma
That’s the first thing my high school physics teacher did drawing on the blackboard to start our study on Newton’s Laws of Motion in class.
“‘F’ equals ‘force’, ‘m’ means ‘mass’, and ‘a’ is ‘acceleration’, force is the product (mathematical multiplication) of mass and acceleration.”
He went on to draw more definitions (1 Newton = 1 kg • m/s², a “Newton force” is the amount of force required to give a 1-kg mass an acceleration of 1 m/s² speed gain…) and formulae (Vf = Vi + a • t, final velocity is the initial velocity plus the product of time and acceleration…), then lots of “real world applications” where he showcased the many ingenious ways math and these formulae could be used to solve the problems…
I was baffled, not much by the parlay of formulae and math and their clever applications, but more by the very first definition of the law. So, this thing we called “force” in the universe, something I thought I knew–a punch on my face, a tow truck pulling stuff on the road, or, even more dubiously, something I didn’t know yet, was product of two numbers, one representing mass (what is that anyway), the other acceleration (that I could comprehend)… Where did all this come from?
Humankind have been trying to understand the world they live in since the day they first gazed at the stars above and looked at the rocks and trees around and wondered what they were and how they came about. At first they assigned spirits or anthropomorphic beings to them so perhaps they could share some emotional binding with them, or they conjectured an “ultimate cause” that gave meaning and purpose to all things existing and happening so they all made sense.
Then came the Enlightenment, when new “natural philosophers” such as Galileo and Descartes established a new way of understanding the physical world by replacing purposive strivings (what Aristotle had called “final” causes) with mathematically formulated laws framed exclusively in terms of mechanical, “efficient” causation. That effort culminated in Newton’s Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) where he laid out his laws of motion that formed the foundation of classical mechanics that high school kids like me were required to learn.
But it is just one beautiful, elegant mathematical model that tries to explain the world in an intelligible way, not anything magical or mystical, that my poor puberty head couldn’t wrap itself around at that time.
We thought we understood the world pretty well with Newtonian Mechanics then, until we delved into the sub-atomic world where Newtonian laws don’t apply any more. So we invented another physical-mathematical model–Quantum Mechanics–to explain what we observe (or cannot observe) there. But then who really understands a world that’s made of “quantum entanglement” (spooky action at a distance), “uncertainty principle” (now you see me, now you don’t), and particle-wave duality? We are now again awaiting another beautiful, elegant, hopefully “unifying” physical-mathematical model that will explain both macro and micro worlds in words we can understand, if that’s possible.
Other than math and logic and geometry, are there ways to understand the world?
Yes, say the theologians/spiritualists: Read the Scriptures, meditate on His words, and the Truth will be revealed to you. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
Yes, say the artists: Look at the beauty in the world, and the secret lies right before you. Ask not “what is the meaning of the world” but “where can I find beauty in the world?”
Yes, say the phenomenologists: We are self-manifesting beings, what we see is manifest to ourselves and our seeing it can be manifest to us. Intellectuality and intelligibility are one and the same, when I view a spider, my mind takes on a new type of being that has the intelligibility of the spider in it, for example.
Is understanding the world such an important thing?
Nah, say the lovers in love to each other: “You are the world to me, that’s all I need to know!”
Nah, says Confucius: “Better liking it than knowing it, even better loving it than liking it!” (知之者不如好知者， 好之者不如樂知者). A twisted interpretation, mind you, but you don’t need to understand how an internal combustion engine (or Tesla’s electric motor) works in order to drive a car or enjoy the ride, do you?
Nah, say I, time to go to bed, a good night’s sleep is more important than anything else in the whole wide world, I heard!
