Sublime

It’s a tablet, once considered the go-to device for science fiction stories about the future—my past—but they stopped being used when it was proven they changed brain chemistry, creating a vast societal addiction that reduced productivity and created generations of people capable of ignoring the world’s growing problems.

Wiener was as worldly as Shannon was reticent. He was well traveled and polyglot, ambitious and socially aware; he took science personally and passionately. His expression of the second law of thermodynamics, for example, was a cry of the heart: We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to

Even in physics, some of the most fundamental explanations, and the predictions that they make, are not reductive.

The microwave hums and rotates his noodle cup while he waits. Cooking by magnet-blasting radiation, causing food molecules to beat the shit out of each other: Who comes up with this stuff, figures out how to market it? Whoever that guy is, he’s probably swimming naked in a pile of cash somewhere, surrounded by supermodels. Life is unfair.

Put another way, this potential energy lowers itself as a frequency of wave patterns until it appears as solid.