Plants Know Best
That’s okay—you can grow plants without paying attention to this sort of stuff. All that I’m asking here is for you
to think about what you could be missing.
Consider first that there is no human logic in nature. For
instance, ask yourself: why does a plant grow up?
It’s a tricky question if fully considered. Think about it—a
plant resists the most powerful force on Earth…gravity. In
school we spend plenty of time learning about how plants
grow, but we are rarely encouraged to ask why—we are
only learning half the story.
Humans formulate scientific laws to provide order in
the way we look at the world. Many of the forces and
processes described in our laws and axioms take place
on a scale that we cannot observe, and yet we take it all
for granted without actually having seen it for ourselves.
We have Bohr models in chemistry class that allow us to
ponder the structure of the basic forms of life, but they
are exactly that—models. Who knows what’s really happening down there?
Why does a plant grow up?
Einstein’s relativity theory attempts to explain the forces
that govern the universe in the way that Newton’s laws
demonstrably govern humans on Earth, but the two are
not always compatible, so a physical law as applied to a human can be different than the law that seems to govern the
behavior of vast processes in the universe.
Consider that a growing plant fails to abide by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or increased entropy. The
idea expressed in this law is that available energy—in this
case, heat—is used up for the purposes of productivity and
growth and in the process some usable energy is always irretrievably lost. As this occurs, disorganization, randomness
and chaos increase.
Why then do plants not decompose as they grow, and
why do warm-blooded animals retain heat against the
forces of entropy? What is it that allows living organisms to
resist these natural laws?
The main reason these apparent inconsistencies go unexplained is because they lack an explanation that fits neatly
into our human constructs. We make laws that only apply
to parts of the universe, and we use scientific methods to
tell us what is true in the natural world when these methods are actually incapable of measuring or describing the
mechanisms at work. Nature works in spirals, not straight
lines. In the end, the subtle energies that work in harmony
to organize life are not only unobservable, but often impossible to measure.
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Maximum Yield USA | March 2012