Order from Chaos

I recently read a book called "The Goal" by Eliyahu M Goldratt. A well known personality, he is known for his way of handling problems in industries, through what people call as the "common sense". He is a genius. From the book, I learnt one thing. That Goldratt can think easily. He is well known for his concept of "Theory of Constraints". He has built the concepts with pure common sense and with some down-to-earth thinking. Nevertheless, he has shown a lot of intuitiveness and dedicated thinking to arrive at the concepts. There was a small story in the book that got my attention very much and made me realize a greater picture. The experience might be the key for many problems.

Mendeleev was a chemist and a scientist. We all know him through the ever confusing "Periodic Table". I don't know how it is for others but for me Chemistry has always been a mystery. I have tried to study it in many different ways but I have not been able to drill any of those mind-boggling chemical equations into my head. I remember that I used to write every equation 15 -20 times especially those of Organic Chemistry. Bloody hell with it. It doesn't just get into the mind. Anyway, let me come to the real story.  Mendeleev did this astonishing work of finding the Periodic Table. So how did he really do it when others didn't? What really happened? Let us see.

Mendeleev wanted to arrange all chemical elements. Normally, when you have data, especially a large amount of data you will have the problem of finding an arrangement that would possibly be of any use to the world. It is difficult because there can be a lot of combinations and permutations possible and you don't know which would serve the best of your purpose. So why Mendeleev and his Periodic Table are popular?

When Mendeleev decided to arrange all elements, he did not know which arrangement to choose. He had a lot of parameters. Atomic weight, specific gravity, electrical conductivity, chemical behaviour etc. Now you can get an idea of the magnitude of the problem he faced. With a little patience, he decided to try out one by one. He chose to use a quantitative measurement that was known for each element and which did not change as a function of temperature or the state of the substance. He took atomic weight as a unique numerical identifier and he started arranging elements like the soldiers of an army in a line. So what is the big deal? All he found was this. Any little intelligent fellow would do this.

Mendeleev would have been ordinary if he had stopped there. But what he did was astonishing. He did not arrange the elements in one line. He identified that each seventh element represents basically the same chemical behaviour, though with increased intensity. For example, in the first column, Lithium which is the lightest of all metals and which when put into water becomes warm. Below it is Sodium, which when put into water, flames. The next one is Potassium which reacts even more violently with water. The last one is Cesium which flames even in regular air. He did not find all the elements. He had a lot of holes in the Periodic table. But this classification gave him the ability to predict the weight and other properties. 

After this was presented, Mendeleev became the laughing stock of the entire community of scientists. Now, the table was not arranged as I told you before. Hydrogen was floating above the table, not actually in any column, and some rows didn't have one element in their seventh column. Several elements were crowded in one spot. It looked a lot more messy that what we have now. This table that Mendeleev presented was the predictive model for the discovery of other elements. It worked with such surprising accuracy. It took some years, but while he was still alive all the elements that Mendeleev predicted were found. The last of the elements that he 'invented' was found sixteen years later. He predicted that it would be a dark gray metal. It was. He predicted its atomic weight would be about 72; in reality it was 72.32. Its specific gravity he thought would be about 5.5 and it was 5.47.

Ten years after the table was accepted, the noble gases were discovered. It so happened that the table had to have eight columns rather than seven. Mendeleev's table became an admiration.

Point here is that we are all trying to do this in our professions. It is not only for a chemist or a scientist. Even in our day to day life what we are trying to do is create order from chaos. All professions work towards the same goal. We try to find the intrinsic order. By intrinsic order, I mean we are trying to find the order that is already there, only seen in a chaotic manner. We just have to find it. What we need is a very simple tool to achieve this. Thinking processes. When you have a thinking process, you can create order from chaos, irrespective of your profession. Only thing is that you need to know how to apply. How to apply the thinking process to different professions? It stems from the fact of what you want to achieve. 

If Chemistry was taught like this I would have probably known all those chemical equations, without strain. Who really cares what you know nowadays? What speaks are the marks that you get? Students are made to cram and jam stuff into their heads, vomit in their exam paper, get marks, get a seat in college, cram and jam again and wonder what happened to the process. Here as well we are in need of a thinking process to help us find the order in what chaos we created. 

Find the Intrinsic order. Order from chaos will result from passion. A journey towards excellence is nothing but creating Order form Chaos. The journey involves thinking, a thinking deeply associated with the spirit of excellence. Let's find the order. In ourselves.

-SATZ