Can physics help us understand habits?
Do you know what crystals are? It is a solid material whose constituent atoms or molecules are arranged in repetitive pattern, forming a lattice. The process of turning a liquid into such a solid material is called crystallisation. Some of the crystals we may encounter in everyday life are salt, diamonds, snow flakes.
In 2012, Frank Wilczek, an MIT professor and Nobel laureate theorised the idea of time crystals; where instead of atoms being arranged periodically in space like a normal crystal, here the atoms are arranged periodically in both space and time.
This video gives a fairly good description of what time crystal are.
Now this is where physics ends and philosophy begins.
Imagine your life being a sum of your thoughts and actions. A ‘thought’ being a set of neural networks firing, usually in response to some environmental stimuli, and ‘action’ being some physical movement in your body that creates a change in that environment.
For the sake of simplicity, let us combine them into a ‘thought-action unit’ or TAU. We will assume that a TAU is the fundamental unit of life. Each day, we experience hundreds or millions of TAU’s, and TAU’s influence future TAU’s as well. It is a dynamic structure, both influencing and being influenced by the environment.
Now in thermodynamics, a fluid state is one where matter will flow, implying the system is more malleable, changing, adapting to the environment, but also unstable. It is difficult to build lasting structures using fluids. Imagine a system of TAU’s where every TAU behaves in an unpredictable way, reacting differently to every change in the environment. That would be chaotic.
So, we need solids. In other words, we need TAUs to ‘crystallise’. Thoughts and actions repeated periodically over time, to provide a reliable scaffolding for us to build our life’s framework on. And thought-actions units repeated reliably over time is what forms a habit.
Habits are time crystals.
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Cheers and love,
Sid.