I think people underestimate themselves, though. Anyone who has ever gotten kids ready for school in the morning has experienced the rich world of modern thinking in physics and mathematics.
Take Parkinson's law to start with: "the amount of work expands to fill the time available". You know the same is true of kids. No matter how early you get them up, the amount of mucking around will expand to fill the time between then and ten minutes before it's time to go - when you'll be yelling at them the way you have to every morning. It is not possible to get ten minutes' worth of getting ready done in half an hour.
Inverse proportion is another good one for starters. Gravity works on inverse proportions: if the distance between two object gets bigger (say a rocket moving away from the Earth) the gravity between them gets smaller. If you have a teenage daughter, you know what I'm talking about. If it's not a really important day and you've got ages to get ready, she'll be up at 5:20. On a day when you need to get out the door ten minutes early, however ...
Entropy. It's well known that entropy increases. Entropy is the state of disorder or the amount of useless energy in a system. Unless you do something to stop it, entropy increases - stop pedalling a bike, for instance, and it will slow and stop. Same for kids. You set the kids in motion -one task each - and then you make the mistake of taking a sip of coffee, or going for a wee or even just blinking. Then just watch the entropy increase! Wandering off, watching the TV , creosoting the cat etc. Anything but being useful. Remember, blink and you're dead!
Wolfgang Pauli had kids. His principle- that two identical electrons cannot have the same quantum state- was formulated one morning while trying to get both school shoes in the same place at the same time, prior to placement upon feet.Not possible. What's good for footwear is also good for sub-atomic particles, apparently.
It was a lesson his mate Werner Heisenberg learned about the same time. It's possible to know where a child is or what they're doing but not both at once.
"I can hear him playing Minecraft on that tablet when he should be brushing his teeth but I can't see him."
Or,
"I can see her sitting there but I have no idea what she's doing; it certainly isn't eating her breakfast."
And, finally, our offspring are born with an intuitive knowledge of Einstein and his work. His theory says that a fast moving object distorts time. Travel fast enough in a spaceship and, when you return, you'll be younger than your children. That'll mess with their heads! The same is true of the forgotten library book that you reminded them about four times and that, not fifteen minutes ago, they assured you was definitely in their bag. Of course you didn't look, and neither did they, so, according to quantum theory, the book was both present and not at the same time until they got to the car, opened their bag and the waveform collapsed along with their certainty.
Enter Einstein. The kid knows that if they run back to the house, doing that fast panting thing kids do to let you know they really are hurrying, then the five minutes it takes to find the book will be compressed into 30 seconds. They certainly return younger than you; you've aged six months because of the time dilation effect of stress and frustration that made the five minutes stretch out to forever and ever, amen. Yet again!
Don't let anyone tell you that advanced maths and physics problems are too difficult; you solve six every morning before your first cup of coffee.
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Sound and Fury is published every Monday and Thursday mornings, Australian Eastern Standard Time.
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