The Great Mental Models Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology

Book Preface

The world is beautiful, fascinating, and full of curiosities, but it doesn’t have to be completely mysterious. Humans may not know
everything about the world, and indeed it often feels like we have just scratched the surface, but we have figured out some fundamentals about how everything on this planet operates. It is those fundamentals that make up Farnam Street’s latticework of mental models, a way of approaching new ideas and situations, problems and challenges with a toolkit of valuable knowledge.

In Volume 1 of The Great Mental Models, we introduced nine general thinking concepts to get you started on the journey of building a latticework of timeless knowledge. Those models had broad applicability, and we hope you were inspired and excited to apply them to achieve better results with fewer problems as you tackled both opportunities and challenges in your life.
In Volume 2 of The Great Mental Models, we continue the journey and explore fundamental ideas from physics, chemistry, and biology. These disciplines offer an exceptional amount of insight that we can apply across all areas of our lives to improve our careers, our relationships, and ourselves.

The truths about the physical world, from the forces that allow us to manipulate energy to the behaviors that drive the actions of all organisms, are constants that can guide our choices.
In Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life, Helen Czerski tells the story of the Fram, a boat designed “to work with nature instead of against it.” In the late 1800s there was immense curiosity about the North Pole. But the ships that were sent to try to 1 get there would get stuck in the ice of the Arctic, freezing in place.

As the ice around the ships grew, it put immense pressure on the hulls, eventually breaking them apart. No one could get to the North Pole without dealing with ice, and the total amount of ice and corresponding pressure to be dealt with was essentially an unknown. No ship had the hull strength to deal with the upper limits of ice pressure possibility. A Norwegian scientist named Fridtjof Nansen came up with the idea for the Fram—a truly unique ship. “She had a smooth curvy hull, almost no keel, and engines and rudder that could be lifted right out of the water. When the ice came, the Fram became a floating bowl. And if you squeeze a curved shape like a bowl or a cylinder from below, it will pop upward. If the squeeze from the ice got too much, the Fram would just be pushed upward to sit on it.” Nansen did not try to improve on the design of existing boats. Instead, he let the reality of ice expansion determine the design of his ship.

The Fram floated across the Arctic Ocean for the next three years, not quite making it to the pole, but collecting reams of valuable scientific data. She got closer to the pole than any ship previously and provided conclusive evidence that the Arctic was an ocean. All of this success was due to trying to answer one question, ‘How can I work with the world, not against it?” As Czerski concludes, “Instead of fighting the inexorable expansion of the ice, [the Fram] had used it to ride across the top of the world.” Taking action that works with the world is more effective, less stressful, and ultimately more rewarding. We don’t waste our time fighting to accomplish the impossible.

About the series

The Great Mental Models series is designed to inspire and challenge you. We want to give you both knowledge and a framework for making it useful.
One of our goals for the series is to provide you with a set of tools built on timeless knowledge that you can use again and again to make better decisions. We will present over a hundred mental models, spread across five volumes, that define and explore the foundational concepts from a variety of disciplines. We then take the concept out of its original discipline and show you how you can apply it in nonintuitive situations. We encourage you to dive into new ideas to augment your knowledge toolbox, but also to leverage what you already know by applying it in new ways, to give yourself a different perspective on the challenges you face. In the first book, we explained that a mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We use models to retain knowledge and simplify how we understand the world. We can’t relearn everything every day, and so we construct models to help us chunk patterns and navigate our world more efficiently. Farnam Street’s mental models are reliable principles that you can see at work in the world time and again. Using them means synthesizing across disciplines, and not being afraid to apply knowledge from different areas far outside the milieu they usually cover.

Not every model applies to all situations. Part of building a latticework of mental models is about educating yourself regarding which situations are best addressed by which models. This takes some work and is not without error. It’s important to constantly reflect on your use of models. If something didn’t work, you need to try to discover why. Over time, by reflecting on your use of individual models, you will learn which models will best help you tackle which situations. Knowing why a model works will help you know when to use it again