Einstein’s Magnificent Secret of Problem Solving: “If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and the remaining five minutes finding the solution.”
With the unlimited internet in our hands, we possess the smartest devices of the age. Devices of which we say “we are paying the price of a car”, and with which we merely phone, send messages, and try to find a cure for the dead ends of our troubles, such as “I liked it” or “he did not like it” on social media, by searching for songs on YouTube.
In fact, Einstein passed on this piece of advice he had arrived at, with the utmost courtesy, so that we would apply it, think about it, and even develop it. Certainly not so that we would share it on the walls of our social media accounts and light it up!
The year 2020 arrived crowned with the golden-glittering virus. Afterwards, we witnessed the explosion of every bit of violence that could have been spread over a century, of every mine laid in the dead-end streets. Destruction within us, destruction in our cities…
On this platform, we are trying to make the best possible use of Einstein’s advice.
For a genius like Einstein, of course, 55 minutes is enough. Almost 1 year has passed over the hopelessly tangled problems we have lived through in this year 2020, which we would write off if we could. We still have not been able to ask a proper question.
Have we not yet even been able to approach the problems before us that are growing unbelievably day by day, that have exploded and scattered their flames, such as the virus, politics, the never-ending war and threats on our borders, energy (oil, gas, the silk road crisis), the earthquake and, most important of all, the economy? Of course, what fault is it of our consciousness, which has become locked on TV screens or on social media and has stayed there. After all, the solution to all events is still being sought in the crowd of rote words scattered from above with half-grasped information.
On this platform, beginning with the question “What happened to us? And What More will happen?”, we are trying to ask questions without letting our attention stray from the subject headings.
First of all, the problems have not yet been clearly defined!
These days, when we say health comes before everything, when we say “everything apart from health turned out to be worthless”, and when there is the illusion that the solution to the problem has been reached by defining our trouble with a public service announcement… The problem is to be able to understand what the “Problem” is. A public service announcement such as Mask-Distance-Hygiene, far from providing a definition and approaching the problem, has on the contrary taken us well away from the problem, and we are still not aware of it.
The definition of the problem will be the focal point of your effort to solve it. Which of our problems above, not all of which we could write down because our hands were trembling, have we been able to approach at its focal point? We cannot approach it, because we are being warned by a public service announcement at every moment!
And the explanation that most of us have failed to understand and that Einstein pointed to is this: the quality of the solutions we find will be directly proportional to the quality of the description of the problem we are trying to solve. When we set out to ask the right questions about the problems we are living through, being sure that we are experiencing the pangs of a process of paradigm change, we have spoken of change on this platform time and again.
This situation, in which we have passed rapidly from order towards disorder and cannot define our own bewilderment, we can understand only by resorting to an apt scientific explanation.
The scientist Ludwig Boltzmann, who will define for us with the Law of Entropy this situation in which we are stuck, can give us first aid.
The present paradigm, which we are about to leave to our past, has sufficiently demonstrated its invalidity.
If only we would get used to this situation at last. We have already gone down in history as a generation stuck between this old paradigm, into which we were born and in which we grew up and were raised, and the new law of entropy, which is proving itself more and more. The new generation of the next “New Normal” will certainly not be able to comprehend how we bowed to principles and ideas in which the faulty definitions were so obvious,
how, unable to lift the mask from our eyes, we lived with undefined definitions that we blindly worshipped for a century. When, stumbling and getting up again, we begin to accept ourselves within the new paradigm, we, as the previous generation, will find ourselves as though living in a country whose language and geography we do not know at all. Because we cannot get out of our old world, because we will not be able to rid ourselves completely of the undefined way of life that is the product of the conditioning we have made our own, we will not be able to communicate with this new world of ours straight away. Just as, in order to survive, we have to learn a foreign language whose letters and even whose tone
bear no resemblance at all to our mother tongue.
According to Ludwig Boltzmann, the destiny of the universe is disorder, that is, it is its law. The disorderly workings of the universe bring forth complex systems. If we take as an example a car and its engine: just as it takes in energy and fuel in an orderly way, converts them into gases of thousands of times greater volume and, by emitting heat and sound into the environment, by turning order into disorder, enables us to go from point A to point B…
In short, the principle of entropy is trying to explain the year 2020 to us in the following way. If an order we were used to, one required by the universal system, has broken down and been swept into chaos, it is necessarily because we are at the beginning of a renewal through change and transformation. Our world, which has now slipped out of our hands, will start again with a different way of working, in a manner we do not know at all. You know, what they call “The Great Reset”… Just as they have sent word, saying that there is little time left to complete the last frame in the window of time.
If we want, as a society, to remain standing and move on to the new system, it is exactly the right time to take action. Otherwise we shall witness, in disorder, how our problem, undefined and condemned to inaction by things like “Mask, distance, be clean, and whatever you do stay at home”, that is, our life energy, moves towards extinction.
If there is a Scientific Board that is curious about this situation, they may consult the advice of scientists such as Mr Ludwig Boltzmann with the principle of Entropy and Mr Albert Einstein with the Universe, his theories and his paradox.
Translated from the Turkish original.