Physics in a Box

I love physics (and all the other sciences really, and art and music and, well, you get the idea). Yet, each month, I have had a difficult time isolating an idea for my article here at the Suite. After giving it much thought, I think I finally discovered my problem, which I will call "Physics in a Box."

Organized Thought

Somewhere along the line, I became enamored of the Western way of organizing information. Our libraries are designed to house books in certain categories, and to cross-reference their contents at only a minimal level. It's understandable, considering the amount of information contained in even a small library (like in my house.) Those of us who do research in books are grateful to authors for their footnotes and appendices which reference their sources for us and make our job easier.

And by now we all know that one of the ideas behind Suite is that topic writers do much of the online research for our members in order to help cut through the thousands and thousands of listings made available in the results of a search. Data has become so extensive that no-one has the time to devote to clawing his or her way through all the sites and reports "out there" which contain less than helpful information just to get at the few nuggets that are available. So, sure, I understand the need for organizing information in a manner which makes it more accessible. But there's also a downside to such organization.

Interdependence of Ideas

When information is organized in the manner of a library, where do you put a book that covers multiple topics - i.e. a couple of sciences, a bit of biography, some geography, a few literary references, etc? Usually, the book ends up in one category determined by the majority of its content. If the book is a biography, it goes in that section regardless of how much other fascinating information it contains. Thus, the reasearcher must be aware of that person's life and what will likely be found in that book in order to take advantage of its content. And the same problem occurs when writing for a topic such as Physics Lite.

Let's say I try to limit myself to a "physics" idea for my monthly article. I can write about a physicist, I can write about classical physics or quantum physics, or perhaps I can do a book review. But this approach -- limiting the articles to content that is strictly about "physics" -- is far too limiting to be of benefit to the reader, let alone the imagination of the writer.

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