Simply Complicated

Recollecting a conversation that I had with Arvind a couple of years back about an incident that happened during my school days. You see,in school I was with a bunch of extremely talented and brilliant people that used to challenge each other in problems in mathematics.On one such day we were trying to solve a trigonometry problem and during the process I tried to solve the problem by using theorems after theorems in order to arrive at the solution but I only ended up making the problem more complicated. On the other hand a friend of mine, who apparently is a genious, was able to solve the same problem in just 3 or 4 steps. The lesson learnt was that best solutions to complicated problems are always simple and are beautiful. And a real genious can solve a problem in the most simplest way.

Later in life I came to know that the revelation above that I had was somewhat in line with Occams Razor which says, all things being equal the simplest solution is the best. Added to the fact that for quite some time now the smartest minds of our species too are trying to find out the common pattern in all that there is or should I say the single theory of everything. It makes sense, right? There can be nothing simpler than being able to explain all that there is by a unified theory.

Now the obvious question that comes into my mind is that if a possibility exists that there is a unifying theory that explains everything in the physical aspect of our life then what about the spiritual aspect of our life? Is it possible that here too only one possibilty exists and if that is true than who is this God and what is the means to know him. Well this post is not entirely about the God conundrum, it's about simplicity, so I'll move on but I will discuss this one more time in this post because it's important.

I held my views about simplicity for a long time and I was pretty convinced about it too. Untill recently I read a few things that made me question my original set of beliefs. And I realised that those beliefs were based on a certain set of assumptions that now stand on shaky ground in the light of some new discoveries.

~I always like to keep my blog posts small and also my mind is over crowded with ideas and is running in many directions so I'll take a small break and get back on this in a day or two.~