While eating at the local Wendy’s (basically the only source of food that is open past 2 PM in all of Templetown – words cannot describe how much I hate this city), I noticed two important things:
- Potentials (Materials, Ideas, Things that aren’t yet in their final Form) always existed in one form or another since the birth of the universe, yet are only usable after undergoing a change or series of changes. The essence is eternal, but the structure is only transient. For example, “this salad did not exist yesterday”: certainly the salad as an assembled component did not, but the lettuce, tomatoes, and partially hydrogenated soybean oil did exist. Even before they existed in those forms, they existed as part of a plant. The First Law of Thermodynamics guarantees this.
- Wendy’s now serves breakfast.
Expanding more on the Potentials, this should be a very intuitive, even downright obvious, idea. What makes it interesting is the particular framing of my thoughts: I realized that this could be used to derive a potential function (as in the amortized analysis technique) that serves as a “signature” of the changes physical objects undergo. I need to develop the idea further, but it’s something to talk about if I ever get around to writing “The Optimization of Systems”.