This is a special post. This is an article that comes from the heart, after analyzing an old (rather young) me. The social service that these websites do by saving our chat histories, is enormous. We rarely experience the process of growing up, while being respectively good/bad at it. But internet provides us with the mirror, one which keeps capturing our present and reflects the past when we need it.
Looking back, I was not someone whom I would be proud of today. I was bad at talking, bad at listening, certainly bad at humour and not at all as innocent as I would like to believe. In summary, I was not better than what I am now. But these are just answers which I could have easily got from little introspection only. The funny part of studying a subject for some time is that we start to seek examples from the subject to apply in our lives. It gradually becomes ingrained in the way we talk. Using this scheme, I would say that my life has undergone a continuous phase transition. While the two phases by themselves are not-so-interesting, the real novelty lies at the critical point, i.e., when the shift in me actually took place. No surprises here though; it was my break-up that shook me up. It was then that I learnt that I could not get away with lies, and that karma bites deep and hard. I was at crossroads then. I could have become a tyrannical asshole, who sees only evil in goodness or I could have become a much less judgmental, practical human being. But none of these would have been possible if not for the external drive in my life, a random force with strange boundary conditions who changed me. We look at steady state systems in physics because they make our lives easier. But serious work only comes from including the fluctuations. These fluctuations might not matter in the end in a mean-field treatment. That's what we generally do, don't we? We use the same eigenvalue for all the spins in our society. It gives effective results for sure, but incorrect ones nonetheless. A deeper theory cares for fluctuations, renormalizations. We do not live in an exact world. So we keep renormalizing until we are tired and accept the norms of a perturbation theory, where the higher order non-linearities are ultimately neglected. In life, we ride through these fluctuations. We soar through the crests and fall into the troughs, and let ourselves ride the flow until we realize that a steady state has arrived. (The real fun is to write a microscopic model at this stage but it is outside the scope of the present article.) Some people fall into the equilibrium states and relax, while others might feel trapped. But for some of us, these equilibrium restrictions are not intellectually satisfactory. We opt for the uncharted territories, the non-equilibrium steady states. Till now, I don't know what states lie above the non-equilibrium regime. For now, may be I am approaching a steady state. I have heard of certain terms, e.g., quantum, strong correlations, etc. As of now, I am just a student in the non-equilibrium regime. Someday, may be, the fruits of life will again be plucked from the tree of knowledge.
