Physics, Philosophies & Humanity’s

quest for freedom

The most important thing a person needs after subsistence is likely to be freedom. Sometimes,
he or she may choose freedom at the cost of subsistence. The reason for this may be the fact
that a man or a woman is free by his or her nature. We see the earliest signs of quest for
freedom in humanity from the Biblical story of Adam and Eve when they desired to “gain
wisdom” by eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As per the story, they did eat
from the tree forbidden by God and their “eyes were opened” enabling them to make judgment
and thus making them morally responsible for their future course of actions, decisions or
choices. In philosophical term, this is called human faculty of “volition” or “free will”.

It is interesting to note that most fundamental physical phenomena observed by us promote the
idea of freedom. When we think of the second law of thermodynamics stating that the total
entropy for an isolated system can never decrease over time or the fact that inside an atom,
addition of extra orbital electrons will successively fill up the outer lying electron orbits and will
avoid overcrowding in the lower orbital, we are reminded of the principle of freedom. The law of
inertia, also called Newton’s first law of motion, states that a body will preserve its state of rest
or state of motion so long as no unbalanced external force acts on it. When we think of
ourselves made up of the billions and billions of these tiny atoms and molecules, or to say “dust”
of the earth as recorded in Bible, it seems natural to us that as human beings we long for
freedom.

Intellectual freedom, a related concept, is the right to freedom and expression of thought. As per
the Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is a human right. It states that:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to
hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas
through any media and regardless of frontiers.” It is not surprising then that many authoritarian
regimes not adhering to democratic principles try to curb intellectual freedom by imposing
coercive rules, sanctions, and measures on those citizens who are antithetic or critical of their
policies or rule. The human history, however, bears witness to the fact that such repressive
regimes, however powerful they may be, had to eventually yield before the power of human
quest for freedom.

What is freedom and how valuable it is for mankind? It is one of the earliest human quests to
answer this question. The discipline of Philosophy deals with this subject in detail. One can refer
to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a credible resource to familiarize oneself with core
concepts of “freedom”, also known as “liberty” in academia. One approach to understand the
concept of freedom or liberty is to start with the concepts of positive and negative freedom. The
positive liberty (or freedom) is the possibility of acting or the fact of acting, in such a way as to
take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. The negative liberty (or
freedom) may be understood as the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. The great
Philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Isaiah Berlin have discussed these concepts,
interpretations and implications thereof in their various works and essays.

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The related concept of “free will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of
rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. This concept has
been dealt in great deal by the works of outstanding renaissance philosophers like René
Descartes and modern philosophers like Helen Steward from University of Leeds and Peter van
Inwagen from University of Notre Dame, to name a few. The Latin proposition “cogito ergo sum”
or “I think therefore I am” was originally coined by René Descartes in his philosophical and
autobiographical treatise “Discourse on the Method.” Descartes asserted that the very act of
doubting one's own existence served as proof of the reality of one's own thinking faculty i.e.
mind and necessitated ‘self’ to exist in order for a ‘thought’ to exist.

As we see the civilizations progress in their cultural and scientific dimensions, the quest for
freedom was the fundamental motivation that ignited human pursuit for development. A man (or
woman) by nature would not like to submit to anything or anyone surrounding him (or her).
Therefore, man started thinking, discovering, and inventing ways to subdue the nature – fauna,
flora and natural phenomena. It may be a matter of musing that most scientific pursuits of
humanity are the result of our never ending quest for freedom. A man did not like to be bound
by the limitations of his vision and therefore invented telescope and has now
discovered MACS0647-JD, the farthest known galaxy about 13.3 billion light-years away from
earth. A man would not relent to earth pulled down by the power of gravity and therefore
computed escape velocity of 11.186 km/s on earth to launch satellites and space-missions, of
which Voyager-1 is more than 2.1 billion km away from the earth when this article was being
composed.

When we talk of freedom, we need to also talk about free access to knowledge. Some widely
acclaimed initiatives like open source communities in software industry or free-access
knowledge portals like MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford Online, Coursera, edX etcetera, are all
result of human quest for freedom. The government of India has recently launched National
Digital Library as a portal and mobile app, providing free access to plethora of useful scientific
and educational knowledge resources. Vigyan Prasar website has provided free access to a
treasure of authentic scientific literature. The most of text books of NCERT have been made
available online. The open access movement emerged in the early 1990s with the
establishment of e-print archive service known as arXiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov) in 1991 to
provide free access to research and scholarly information in high-energy physics. The later
initiatives like Santa Fe Convention of 1999 and Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2001
brought new era in promising free access and reuse rights to many refreed scientific research
journals and other scholarly literature. Google Scholar also serves a great purpose in providing
free access to catalogued scientific knowledge. The internet sites like Project Gutenberg and
Internet Archive sites provide wealth of scientific books and publications freely for open access.
Interestingly, noted theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking recently agreed to make his 1966
doctoral thesis available free for download on Cambridge's Apollo repository. The demand for
downloading Hawking’s thesis was so voluminous that it resulted in the temporary crash of
Cambridge website. The popular scientist has been quoted on the Cambridge website saying,

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"By making my PhD thesis Open Access, I hope to inspire people around the world to look up at
the stars and not down at their feet; to wonder about our place in the universe and to try and
make sense of the cosmos. Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered
access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and inquiring mind across the
spectrum of human understanding. Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who have
gone before them, just as I did as a young PhD student in Cambridge, inspired by the work of
Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein. It's wonderful to hear how many
people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis - hopefully they won't be
disappointed now that they finally have access to it."

The freedom has been topic of research in ancient eastern philosophies like Chinese Daoism
and Confucianism and Indian philosophies of Vedic and post-Vedic periods. The concept of
liberating one’s soul or concept of being free from the shackles of the world-orders was
relentless pursuit of ancient eastern sages. Many similar concepts have been later echoed in
various forms and schools of mysticism wherein the final aim of a human life was to
transcendent into some kind of liberated state-of-being. The underlying soul of these
philosophies and movements was man’s unceasing quest for freedom. The great awakening
period of the European society or the Renaissance was also a kind of freedom movement to
dispel intellectual darkness accumulated through ages of ignorance or lack of knowledge.

It is a philosophical debate of great interest to note that in order to enjoy freedom in a society
and maintain any social order, the freedom needs to be exercised under compliance of certain
rules and regulations. A good way to understand this freedom is the requirement of following
traffic-rules on a road so that all commuters can drive “freely”. We can call such freedom as
“freedom in action” when rules are required to be honored that no individual is enjoying his or
her freedom at the expense or discomfort of others. In such a worldview, we are all intertwined
in order to sustain our state of freedom. One beautiful example of such a social order concept is
African philosophy of “Ubuntu” which means “I am because we are”.

So what is behind the man’s quest for freedom? What does he or she achieve by being free?
The question demands a thorough philosophical investigation. To make the readers muse over
this matter, we quote the famous words of Lord Jesus Christ as recorded in the Bible: “Then you
will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

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About the Authors, Contact Details and Address:
Dr. Venus Dillu completed her PhD in Applied Physics from Delhi Technological University and currently
teaches Physics at Sharda University, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh

Mr. Bhagirath Kumar Lader completed his B.Tech (Computer Science & Engineering) from Indian
Institute of Technology, Delhi and PGDM from Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow (Noida Campus)
and currently works for a Maharatna Public Sector Undertaking in Oil & Gas Sector at Noida