Law 3: Your life must never reach a steady state solution | Science, Philosophy and Psychology!

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-27

[00:00:04]Um, he will talk about steady state solutions to apparently your own personal problem and not science. Um, and then if you would give me the word when you're done, that'd be great.

[00:00:17]Yes, I'm back.

[00:00:20]And yes, I'll crack jokes. And yes, you'll have to pretend to laugh.

[00:00:26]Thank you. I was hoping one would do that. Thank you. Okay, so one correction. The title of the talk is no steady state solution. That's why the scratch, but it's not good. Okay, so I'm going to give you a little bit of context. Uh the story starts 3 years ago. I can use this.

[00:00:45]And uh the context is I was in uh India.

[00:00:49]That's where I'm from. And I had just moved to um Munich. Uh that's where I did my masters. And this happened after 6 months of struggling with visa and I had to uh skip a semester and it was uh just too annoying. And then how many of you have moved uh from the east to the west?

[00:01:11]Okay. So uh I don't know if you guys know but there is a very dramatic difference in the way that um teachings are usually offered you know uh as compared to uh eastern education system versus western and uh to adapt to this this itself is a very annoying thing that's a kind word I have to use but um I was in conversation with one of my friends and I was basically saying and ranting something on these nights that oh I don't know what to do I'm doing so many things and There's no growth.

[00:01:44]That's how I sounded. Just giving you the real thing. How many of you have felt this?

[00:01:52]Okay. Good for the rest of you.

[00:01:57]I don't know. Okay. Anyways, I was saying all this and then this guy, he is a non-academic, so he doesn't understand the real drama that's going on in my life. And then he says something onto the line of this. He takes a pause and he's like, "No pressure, no time."

[00:02:13]Exactly. And this is my reaction.

[00:02:18]Don't tell me that. I'm a [ __ ] physicist. I know. Okay.

[00:02:23]And then I asked myself the question, um, where did this come from? Like, no pressure, no diamonds. Apparently, it's from a 19th century philosopher. Um, so it works. But then you don't use that information to communicate with scientists and academics like us because we want something actionable. We want something that makes sense to us, not some obscure passage from an old ancient text which is sitting on some library and then dust is accumulating on it.

[00:02:51]So then I asked myself how do you communicate philosophy to scientists and academics because at the end of the day we are also humans and we want to navigate the challenges of lives and you have curve balls coming in left right and center probably more than regular human beings I guess right so how do you communicate what is one thing that all scientists love >> results Okay, >> let's go a little bit more broader.

[00:03:24]>> Sorry.

[00:03:25]>> Pie charts.

[00:03:25]>> Pie. No, let's go a little bit broader.

[00:03:28]>> Money.

[00:03:31]>> No, I I'll take that. But yeah. Uh, well, science.

[00:03:37]>> Oh, >> right. Irrespective of your where you're from, you are a scientist, so you like science. That's one thing. That's one perspective from which we look at things right we we often try to draw parallels between things and then I thought maybe we should club philosophy and science and I started looking into this and then there is this third piece of the puzzle we we'll talk about this later if we have um some time or um I actually left it for you guys to ask questions about it or guess what that might be but anyways so this is not really a novel concept you know um just like any PhD student um coming up with an idea which is not very novel. This is also not novel. Um that's exactly why most of the physicists have been philosophers in the past and that's exactly why um Radb also offers a physics and philosophy course.

[00:04:31]Anyone has seen that?

[00:04:33]>> Yeah. Okay. Good.

[00:04:36]Then I went through a big rabbit hole of different books, different philosophy books and then look reading back in terms of science and all these things and then I drew I started drawing parallels between these because it made sense to me and then I came up with 12 axioms or laws or postulates that's today right so I have this list of uh different ways in which um I tried to put philosophy in now if if I put uh all the 12 here we will never get to dinner.

[00:05:07]So I don't want to do that. But we will pick one law which is one of my favorites and which also answers the question of no growth which I was facing uh in the story that I mentioned and the law says your life must never reach a steady state solution.

[00:05:24]Let's unpack this. Okay.

[00:05:27]All right.

[00:05:30]Exactly. I love the giggles. Thank you.

[00:05:32]Okay. So life if you describe it as a function in which theta I different aspects of your life right so your life can be different in different aspects what I mean by this you can be a different academic self you can different uh family self you can be a different person in respect to your hobbies and all of these things combined together make you you right now what is the steady state solution of this function Perfect.

[00:06:06]>> And because we're going for never reaching not equals to zero. So we do this with respect to time. Yes.

[00:06:16]Quiz again. Can you expand this in terms of limits?

[00:06:22]>> Sleep.

[00:06:23]>> Sorry.

[00:06:24]>> Sleep.

[00:06:25]>> Sleep.

[00:06:26]>> Sleep.

[00:06:28]>> Yeah. I did not get you. It >> doesn't matter.

[00:06:33]Yes.

[00:06:34]>> But derivative of of L or respect the T be like your peak of your career or something. Doesn't have to be when you flatline.

[00:06:44]>> It's not >> like your life goes up and then you have some like in your 50s or something you >> but why is it going up?

[00:06:53]>> And you're doing better and better and then you have some peak and then maybe you get all the worse and worse but that peak has derive zero.

[00:07:03]This is instantaneous.

[00:07:06]>> Yes.

[00:07:07]>> Yeah. So it can be it's not equal to zero and >> it is equal to zero at the top.

[00:07:13]>> No, but then you die basically.

[00:07:19]Anyways, in in in interest of time, let's move on. I can write this in terms of a small change in terms of time. So this basically tells me that in a short interval time delta t there must be a change in your life which is not really hard is it right and this change can come from any aspect of your life that we're talking about it can be academic it can be nonacademic it can be literally any aspect which makes a change and this change term is what I call growth now this is much more interesting as compared to no pressure no diamonds because now I have a formula that I can actually use to evaluate whether there's growth in my life or not which makes much more sense to me. Now there's a small problem in that. Yes, we'll take a question before that passing.

[00:08:12]>> Negative growth is something to avoid.

[00:08:15]Right.

[00:08:15]>> Exactly. That's the problem that I was mentioning. Love it. And that's why I make this change.

[00:08:23]>> Perfect on Q. I did not plan that. I swear. I swear I did not plan that.

[00:08:30]But that's exactly right. Right. Um that's why I put modulus. We we spoke about failures in the morning and we spoke about failures just now. But then if you if you think about it most of your life you you will have more failures than success. you know uh if you have moved from masters to PhD uh if you have changed research groups or countries or even universities then I can guarantee it that you did not just apply to one position and got it right the ratio of failures to success will always be high. So does that mean those negative growths like Pascal mentioned were not really growths? No. That's why I put um a modulus to this. Now this is the end of the law but I will leave you with one announcement of sorts. So all the 12 axioms postulates and things I am putting it into a book.

[00:09:26]So I am writing a book named tentatively being a nerd will save your life because I think it really does because most of the times we academics thinks in terms of uh life in a very different way as regular people do right it's it's a very different outlook on your problems and most of your problems are very different as compared to regular people face and there is not really any book or guidelines that help you navigate this in the way that you understand you and I understand. So to bridge this gap I'm trying to write a book and if you'd like to be um known about when it comes out I'm trying for this year end but we'll see uh because I'm still on truck two.

[00:10:12]So, and one more quick exercise that I'll leave it uh leave you with is that when you do think about um these things later um when you're having dinner or something, think about the times when you felt that there was no growth and now with this information just try to calculate whether you did have growth or were you just not able to see it right and if you do find it please write an email I'd love to know from or just find me. Thank you.