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Nerd Cheat Sheet: – Definition of Potential, Exploring Relativity
To explore how meaning shifts across the Social Knowledge Base (SKB), I compared the definition of potential across English and German sources — OED, Duden, Google, and ChatGPT. Each reflects its own cultural and linguistic logic. The detailed analysis appears in Nerd Cheat Sheet: Finding the Definition of Potential.
The results show something important: definitions vary with location, context, and the system you ask, yet none of them contradict one another. Each highlights a different angle of the same idea. This is the SKB at work. And clarifying what potential means allows us to build an analogy that sharpens our observations and guides our assessment of consequence.
Science and mathematics belong to what I call the Abstract Senses. They allow us to extend beyond direct physical perception by applying abstract reasoning to tangible observations. When used well, they augment reality to the point where we can explain and predict it with remarkable accuracy.
Potential is often mistaken for probability. Clarifying the difference is powerful:
- Potential = what could happen
- Probability = how likely it is to happen
Both concepts matter when we evaluate consequences. The analogy here concerns the nature of the outcome, not the likelihood of it. In business, risk analysis considers both aspects: the desired result and the probability of success. In daily life we do the same—for example, when deciding whether to pull out of a side road onto a busy street.
Having a definition of potential allows us to examine it from multiple perspectives. In my imagination, the theory of relativity represents exactly this: looking at something from different angles. Some viewpoints reveal what others hide; some have insufficient information to fully identify what is being observed. Nerd Cheat Sheet: Exploring Relativity looks more deeply at how perspective shapes understanding.
Energy as the Analogy
The Law of Conservation of Energy—the First Law of Thermodynamics—states that nothing in the universe is ever gained or lost, only transformed or transferred. Every fall, every spark, every heartbeat participates in this constant exchange.
But what exactly is energy?
The answer depends on who you ask: a physicist, a philosopher, a historian, or a small community with no formal word for abstract quantities. Even cultures without a technical term for energy clearly understand effort, heat, motion, and consequence. Again, the SKB reveals its many faces.
For our purposes, energy provides the ideal analogy for potential:
- Both are properties, not things.
- Both describe what could happen given the right conditions.
- Both require an initiator—a force, a trigger, a spark—before anything moves.
The Bouncing Ball
Imagine a soccer ball balanced at the top of a staircase. At the bottom is a table set with crystal glasses. This is an Observation.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of potential, the ball could bounce down the stairs and smash the glasses. That possibility is one Consequence—but not the only one. The ball could also miss the table entirely. This reflects the probability component: potential energy predicts the scale of a possible outcome, but not its likelihood.
Physics predicts the ball’s potential energy using:
Energy (J) = m (kg) × 9.81 (m/s²) × h (m)
Where:
- m is the mass of the ball
- g is gravitational acceleration
- h is the height above the table
- Energy is an abstract quantity describing what the system could do
Energy is not a thing; it is a relationship between what exists and what could move. The ball at the top of the stairs “has” energy only because it can fall. Anything with a position has potential.
This abstract calculation allows us to anticipate consequences before they occur—which is exactly what we try to do in life.
But potential alone does nothing. The ball remains still unless something disturbs it. Every potential needs an initiator—just as discussed in Motivation with the domino analogy.
Consequences in Motion
Now imagine the ball actually falls. As it moves from the top of the stairs to the table, several things happen:
- Each bounce creates sound and a tiny, undetectable rise in temperature in both the ball and the stairs.
- When the ball strikes the glasses, energy transfers into shattered crystal and the sharp sound of breaking glass.
- All these effects—noise, heat, deformation—dissipate into the environment as a faint rise in temperature.
- At the end of the event, the ball’s original potential energy is gone, scattered irreversibly into the surroundings.
To restore the original state—ball back on the top step, glasses unbroken—requires new energy from another source. Nature does not rewind itself.
Thermodynamics tells us that the early universe also began in a state of extremely high potential energy. Since then, everything has been running downhill—irreversibly—much like the falling ball.
No process is perfectly efficient.
No transformation leaves the world exactly as before.
And every action leaves a trace.
Removing the ball before it falls is the most sensible Action—unless, of course, this is an art installation titled Ball Plots Against the Glasses.
Human Potential
Energy is measurable; human potential is not. Like gravity, motivation is a force — but one that acts through people, not objects. Yet the parallels are striking. Other forms of potential exist in abundance:
- the potential of communication and emotion
- the potential contained within law and enforcement
- the potential of thinking and learning
- the potential to change one’s life trajectory
These cannot be calculated in joules, but they follow similar patterns.
When realised, they create consequences.
Once released, they cannot be “put back in the bottle” any more easily than broken glass can reassemble itself.
Over time and across space, the effects of our actions dissipate—but not before they shape the people around us. Occasionally an exception occurs: an internet post goes viral, producing a momentary peak far beyond ordinary influence. This spike may be beneficial or harmful, and it is usually accidental. Hoping to “go viral” is not a realistic goal; its probability is comparable to winning the lottery.
The Fermi Icing on the Cake
The final insight from Nerd Cheat Sheet: Exploring Relativity touches on the Fermi Paradox and the uncomfortable question it raises:
“If intelligent life is not unique to Earth, why haven’t we heard from it?”
One unsettling answer is the possibility of a Great Filter ahead—the idea that intelligent species tend to destroy themselves before becoming spacefaring. For humans, the potential for self-destruction may have begun with the First World War. From that point onward, our ability to shape—or end—civilisation accelerated dramatically.
As social evolution continues, the possibility of self-inflicted catastrophe grows alongside knowledge, technology, and the global broadcast reach of individuals through modern communication systems. This is a reality—and a relativity—we must live with.
News and the SKB
News is our window into this complexity. But news is not neutral. It is the gossip layer of the SKB, filtered through competing biases, locations, and agendas. Given its many-faced nature, it is no surprise that what we see and hear often conflicts and confuses.
Questions
How do we live with this awareness without folding under existential threat?
And more importantly:
How can we act in ways that maximise our small but meaningful positive impact—both locally and indirectly across the world?
Conclusion
The answer begins with continual self-education—including questioning our own values and beliefs. If we are stable within our social circle, we can rationalise our relationship with the wider world. From that grounded vantage point we can identify our real potentials and opportunities.
If our environment prevents this, we may need to move—metaphorically or literally—and rebuild our social foundations. Fulfilling our responsibility to ourselves is part of fulfilling our responsibility to others.
There is a deep commonality between physical energy and human potential:
- Potential must be recognised before it can be managed.
- Potential requires an initiator—force in physics, motivation in life.
- Transitions are never perfect—energy disperses; effort ripples through social circles.
- Consequences are irreversible—spent energy and spent effort both change the world permanently.
When someone says they “have no energy,” the metaphor is truer than they realise. For anything to happen, energy—physical or emotional—must be transferred. Once spent, it resides elsewhere, unreachable.
The secret is understanding what you are buying when you spend it.
The world is a dynamic, chaotic system. New potentials will arise, and windows of opportunity will pass. It is not about using 100% of everything. It is about achieving 80% of the gain with 20% of the effort—the pursuit of the big wins.
It is neither necessary nor sensible to explore every potential — only those that lead us toward better consequences.
📖 Series Roadmap
- Forward: A Little Background
- Introduction: Action, Reaction, and the Human Paradox (16.09.2025)
- Looking Back in Time: The Development of the Human Brain (23.09.2025)
- Abstract Senses: Enhancing the way we see the world outside (30.09.2025)
- Bias as a Concept & Climbing the Stairs: Pattern Recognition & Everyday Tasks (07.10.2025)
- Abstract Feelings and Abstract Senses (14.10.2025)
- Motivation (04.11.2025)
- The Social Knowledge Base (11.11.2025)
- Potential (18.11.2025)
- The Subliminal Way We Go Through Life (26.11.2025)
- Taking Responsibility (02.12.2025)
- Fishing for Complements (22.12.2025)
- Peter and Fermi (22.12.2025)
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Nerd Cheat Sheet: – Definition of Potential, Exploring Relativity
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