Viswanathan K's Thoughts

One of Isaac Asimov’s tales is titled The Final Question . Well into the future, the very hi-tech inhabitants of the future are worried. By the second law of thermodynamics! Or rather, the implied consequence of that law.   Without getting into the details of what the law is, let’s focus on the consequence that is scary. The law implies that everything in the universe will eventually cool down and decay. In that setup, no free energy will exist to drive any further processes. It is called the “heat death of the universe”.   Or as TS Eliot poetically put it: “This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”   So these hi-tech inhabitants ask their cosmic supercomputer: How can the second law of thermodynamics be overturned?   The supercomputer starts working on the question. Eventually, long after all life has ended, the stars have died out, and as nothing new emerges in the universe, and the universe is on the cusp of the gloomy end...

My dad and I disagree on whether things are ever wrong. Nope, the topic isn’t moral wrongs or nonsensical beliefs based on no justification. Rather the topic was about views or theories built upon available data which later proved to be…well, not correct. To me, such views or theories are wrong. (Just to be clear, I don’t mean the people who came up with those ideas were idiots). My dad disagrees: to him, if the view or theory was based on all available data of the time, then it isn’t right to call it wrong just because you got more data later on. I suspect that my dad believes that my stance is, to quote Issac Asimov: “Everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.” But I don’t believe that all wrongs are “equally wrong”. In fact, I fully agree with Isasac Asimov’s point about the relativity of wrong: “When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you thi...