Thinking from First Principles - The Physics framework of thinking !! 🔥

First Principles - The Physics framework of thinking!!

       "The Earth is flat". This is what people thought, because they could see people,vehicles, all moving in the horizontal direction, until science came and proved it wrong. Like this, in our day to day life, we start assuming things  to be true, that we observe or what people tell us, without thinking whether it is actually true or appearing to be. So how do we know the actual fact? Can we change the way we think? YES... we need to adopt the "First Principles Thinking" method.

What is First Principles Thinking? Why should we use it?

        The first time I heard this was from SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk. First principles thinking  is a kind of physics way of looking at the world. It is basically boiling things down to the fundamental truths, that you know are true and reasoning from up there. In mathematics, it is known as an axiom. Normally, what people do is to reason by analogy i.e., to follow the trend or copying what other people are doing with slight variation.

The reason why people prefer reasoning by analogy is because it doesn't require much mental energy to think about the subject/particular domain as people have already done that in the past and it's easy to follow the same blueprint. But thinking by first principles does require mental energy to go down and search for the roots. 

So you start by getting down to the facts and once you have those foundation of facts, you can take the next step to improve each little piece of  information. By this way you end up exploring the subject/domain widely.

Who used this technique ?

    This method of thinking has been used by many great people. It is a dominant mode of  thinking among the scientists like - Aristotle - 'Father of Biology' who used to dissect the organism into parts and sub parts and studied carefully from cells to the organs and he named the smallest sub category in any domain as the first principle.

   But in today's world nobody understands the philosophy of first principles thinking more effectively than entrepreneur Elon Musk, who built his rocket company SpaceX solely based  on first principles, even without an aerospace degree. Elon used this physics framework and asked, 'if I break down the rocket into individual parts, what's really there in a rocket?'  

   Let's try to understand this technique with a few examples.There wouldn't have been inventions and discoveries at all if scientists hadn't practiced first principles thinking. Before the discovery of gravity, everybody knew - a  ball thrown up, comes down and nobody questioned the science behind it. But Sir Isaac Newton was the one who questioned about this beautiful aspect of nature of  why things thrown up, doesn't continue to go up (exception-rocket, which also requires a large amount of thrust to escape the earth's gravity) but get attracted towards the earth. Why did this kind of question arise in his mind when nobody even thought of it! By studying and writing the basic mathematical and physics laws and building up from simple steps, he was able to establish the law of gravitation.

Another example: suppose you wanted to start a battery company and at first you want to know about  batteries. Somebody comes and tells you- 'hey look, batteries were quite expensive to manufacture in the past and so will they be in future'. This will make you give up your plan. But if you start by first principles, you start by asking-what are material constituents of a battery?-nickel,cobalt,aluminium etc so you break that down on material basis and then what's the stock market value of material constituents?-if you buy them on this basis,you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into shape of a battery and you can have batteries that are much cheaper than anyone realizes.

Final word

       It's easy to describe the first principles but quite difficult to practice. This is because the fundamental truth that people believe might not be the actual truth, because old conventions and previous forms are often accepted without questioning and once accepted,they hinder the growth of creativity.

 Aristotle said-"a person will not have the complete knowledge of truth unless he/she understands first principles" and also conventional thinking doesn't drive innovation in any domain. 

  The best solution is not run behind the herd and to look at a new direction. Be open minded  and enhance your logical thinking, by questioning your beliefs', whether it actually makes sense or is it logically enough to convince you.


                         THANK YOU

If you like this article,do share it with your friends...😃


Feel free to comment and share your valuable feedback,suggestions and questions in the comments section.