Kenneth: I spoke about my experience reading “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking and how a few of the underlying of principles of quantum mechanics and relativism actually apply to education, learning and the Lawline way. Specifically, I enjoyed how so many of the theories or principles that initially seem either counter intuitive or simply counter to how daily life works actually allow for much more flexibility once they are better understood. One example comes from the second law of thermodynamics, the principle that all matter favors and is moving towards a more disordered state. The second law of thermodynamics is the basis for much of the argumentation in the book surrounding the theory that the universe is expanding and the reasons black holes behave as experimental physicists think they do.
Yet, it would seem that daily working life at Lawline, on face, is about moving towards greater order: a more organized website, more streamlined hiring processes, Google Docs to organize data, etcetera . Yet, in creating all of these ordered structures, an incredible amount of energy is expended to allow the brains of those involved to make these decisions, not to mention energy expended to commute to work to engage in these activities. In fact, the energy expended in various forms by Lawliners to reach these various levels of order definitely outweighs any magnitude of order achieved, and with greater energy emitted comes greater disorder (a hotter object is by definition, more disordered, as it becomes hotter because molecules within it are moving around more quickly and running into other molecules more frequently). So while we may be making Lawline more organized, it comes at the expense of energy expended and disorder created elsewhere (which is part of the reason we’re in constant need of building temperature adjustment).
I also appreciated and commented in my presentation on Stephen Hawking’s willingness to admit when he had made mistakes, whether about blackholes being invisible by definition (there are some unique exceptions where they may be visible) or simply in his admission that, due to the uncertainty principle, he will never be fully correct or accurate in any of his proposals, but simply nearing closer to an absolute. He’s considered one of the foremost experts on blackholes, and yet he would not have reached this point without proposing hypothesis that ultimately proved to be contradicted; through stumbling and learning why he had been wrong, he has reached conclusions that appear to be closer to the physical truth. Extrapolating this, any workplace, Lawline or otherwise, would seem to be able to perform better, and reach greater outcomes more frequently, the more open it is to allowing workers to experiment and innovate, whether with re-organizing the current systems or being explicitly given a certain period of time each day or week to imagine the current workplace without any of its structural constraints, simply as an ideal (in our case, ASTED) and a mission, and then throw ideas against the wall that would legitimately be applied, and not just acknowledged as innovative, in the current work environment.