Language of the Universe - Formulas and Locks

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Everybody loves a good formula.

In times of pandemic, governments and pharma companies would give an arm and an eye, if you will, to get that vaccine formula, or the composition. A central bank can manage inflation without surprises, or an investment advisor can guarantee a return with a basket of assets.

It is like getting a key to a stubborn lock.

The fading effect of Formulas

Back in my school, a much touted line “Put the formula, get the answer” almost became an aphorism. It was used by certain teachers, fellow classmates, seniors and of course intrusive relatives.

Later, when you prepare for competitive exams where time is a bigger punishing force than complexity of questions, formulas act as the magic pill. They shorten response time to answer.

Once you have seen the effectiveness of memorizing formulas, the enchantment begins. The mind starts looking for formulas that can navigate a problem’s complexity.

The problem-solving function is partly replaced by warehousing these tags in our brain.

In this general unanimity, you will have voices that nudge you to disapprove these short-term fixes and build long-term understanding and capability, adding to the chatter in our grey matter.

As I look back, substantial number of formulas have faded away from memory, from the most exotic to the mere tactical.

One may argue the utilitarian nature of life, where present challenges engage more of our developed skills and current knowledge. This dampens away the fixed formulas in our heads.

Another argument that finds more favor is the emphasis on “Conceptual learning”.

The idea here is not to debate the virtues of conceptual learning or, benefits of memorizing formulas.

It is rather to examine the journey connecting the two!

A simple abstraction

We have a lock, and have lost its key.

A locksmith is called and he starts the key making process. To arrive at the teeth incision that fits, he undertakes an iterative process of taking impressions on the keyblank and then chisel towards the final biting.

Taking a closer look at the process, we realize that the lock existed before the key.

In a similar way, the physical world from weather, the atom to the outer space have existed even before humanity discovered tools and equations to understand their phenomena and properties.

A keyblank is a starting point in the discovery. It can be imagined as the final key, plus our ignorance around the configuration.

The iterative process of creating the biting is similar to how a scientist, or a mathematician starts with a base model and set of assumptions. The minute chiseling and shaping is replicated as tuning the model towards a level of reliably answering or explaining the phenomena.

Now, let’s apply this abstraction.

Gravity had existed long before Newton and his famous Law of Gravitation. He could discover thru a lifetime of work and predecessors like Kepler, the key to explain force of gravity between two objects thru:

                                                                          

Without worrying on the constituents of this formula, the core idea is to understand the phenomena of gravity as the lock, and the above formula provides a model to calculate this force.

You memorize this formula and with confidence look to taking a test. With conspiratorial forces at work, your examiner adds one more object and asked you to calculate among 3 objects!

That would be moving the question to another dimension.

More likely, you may forget this equation before the end of this blog.

Locks around us

Building a learning framework with formulas is like carrying keys with limited or, unknown consequence.

Hence, the learning process in a child, or an adult, at university or a company has to factor disproportionately higher understanding of locks, the less understood or the unexplained.

The keyblanks that we hand over to them, followed by the iterative process of discovery to the formula, is the journey that may not fade away.