If You Think You Are Sitting Still as You Read This, You’re Mistaken

One of my students told me he was writing a paper about the efforts of the United States to maintain neutrality during World War I.

And I thought: Right. As if anything can remain neutral in our universe for long.

Strange to say, but the universe does not run well in neutral. Most of the time, the only way to stay in place is to keep moving. The status quo needs constant tending. Doing nothing is not an option--or perhaps I should say: Nothing doing!

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Take something really simple. Say you are sitting on a chair, reading this column, thinking there is not much going on (physically speaking), assuming that it doesn’t require an exertion of force to stay put. You would of course be wrong.

If the ground beneath you weren’t pushing back on your bottom with a force equal to that with which your bottom pushes on the Earth, you’d fall right through. In fact, gravity would cause the entire Earth to collapse if it weren’t for the constant shoving of electrons in atoms, elbowing each other out of the way, creating a permanent pressure that counters the relentless pull of gravity.

It’s often the way: Scratch the surface and “neutrality” becomes nothing but a cover for a sometimes precarious balance of opposing forces. As you sit on your chair, you don’t think of yourself (or even the chair) as electrically charged. But you’re electrically neutral only because the positively and negatively charged particles in your body balance each other out. If you were to pull them apart, the electricity in your body could power a good-sized city.

Or forget sitting, and stand up. What does it take to stand still? An enormous amount of continuous feedback from your brain to the balance sensors in your ears to the muscles in your legs simply to keep you from falling over. (Anyone who has ever tried to maintain a “neutral spine” while standing or doing exercise knows how hard this can be.)

Even then, you can’t ever really stand (or for that matter lie) still. You’re moving with the surface of a spinning Earth, which in turn is orbiting the sun, which in turn is strolling around the Milky Way and so on and so forth. There is no standing still in our universe. You are always in motion relative to something, whether you can sense it or not.

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Indeed, Einstein’s equations describing gravity revealed--to everyone’s surprise--that the universe couldn’t remain static even if it wanted to. It has to expand or contract. Currently, it seems delicately balanced between the collapsing and expanding, and cosmologists would like to know why.

Even nothing itself isn’t neutral. The vacuum of empty space jitters with continual uncertainty; particles of matter are coming into existence all the time, exactly balanced by an equal number of particles of antimatter; indeed, this energy of emptiness may well account for most of the energy in the universe--even though in terms of matter, it adds up to nothing.

Scientists know that it’s a lot easier to “neutralize” a problem than to eliminate it completely. For example, astronomers would see the stars a lot more clearly if they could eliminate distortions caused by turbulence in the air--in effect, take the twinkle out of starlight. But it’s hard to get the atmosphere to stand still, so instead, a technique called “adaptive optics” keeps track of the wiggles in the atmosphere, then exactly counters the wiggles to make them go away. It’s like adding minus one to one to make zero. Thousands of times per second.

At some level, even smart politicians know there’s no such thing as neutrality. That’s why we have checks and balances built into democracy, economic policies and international agreements, so that everything has a way of pushing back on everything else. It’s a lot of work maintaining stable balance, but really, there’s no alternative. Equilibrium is always dynamic.

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In biological systems, neutrality is death. An organism that doesn’t constantly put energy to use fighting disintegration dies. The Second Law of Thermodynamics guarantees it. Disorder is the natural order of things and if you don’t battle it constantly, things fall apart. Shoelaces come untied. Rooms get messy. Teeth decay. Waists spread. Food rots. Tires wear. Everything from schools to relationships deteriorates.

Even mountains, sooner or later, get worn down, and if the energy of radioactive decay didn’t continually work to uplift them, the whole Earth would be flat.

Increasing disorder (quantified as entropy) is what makes the arrow of time point only one way; it’s a phenomenon so familiar that everyone understands intuitively that the universe can’t run in reverse.

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that it doesn’t run in neutral either.