Thursday, February 9th 2006
It's Diffusion Dammit!
Let me begin by defining a few terms:
Diffusion - the passive transportation of particles (really small pieces of matter (stuff)) from areas of high concentration (a lot of stuff) to areas of low concentration (not a lot of stuff).
Osmosis - the diffusion of water; in other words, the movement of water in order to create a state of equilibrium in solute concentration (stuff in water) across a membrane.
Let us analyze the following claim: "I'm going to lay my head on this book and learn through osmosis!" (or any variation on this basic theme).
First of all, let's completely and utterly ignore the fact that this is outrageously ridiculous and pretend for a second that knowledge exists as matter. So, granting that knowledge is matter, a book could be considered as having a higher concentration of knowledge and your brain as having a lower concentration of knowledge (note: this would be an excessively low concentration of knowledge if you actually made the aforementioned statement). Further, let us assume that your thick skull is a semi-permeable membrane through which knowledge can travel.
From these two assumptions, and with a working knowledge of our world, we could safely conclude that knowledge would travel from the high concentrations of the book to the much lower concentrations of your brain until the concentration in each reached a state of equilibrium. Congratulations, we have just established (by granting these two assumptions) it is possible to gain knowledge (learn) through the process of diffusion.
How then, would this same analysis apply to the oft quoted statement above: "I'm going to lay my head on this book and learn through osmosis"? Again, granting that knowledge exists in particulated matter form, what would happen if equilibrium were reached by osmosis rather than diffusion?
Just as before, the book contains a higher concentration of knowledge than your brain, but since osmosis is occurring rather than diffusion, water is the element being transported between the two systems, not the knowledge. Thus, water will travel from your brain to the book, effectively increasing the concentration of knowledge relative to water in your brain and decreasing the concentration of knowledge relative to water in the book until a state of equilibrium has been reached. However, in the case of osmosis, no knowledge particles have actually traveled from the book to your brain. Equilibrium has instead been reached by diluting the concentration of knowledge in the book with the water gushing from your knowledge-starved head.
So in the future, please remember: if you are going to learn through passive transportation of knowledge partices, at least be theoretically accurate and acknowledge that the feat is occuring through Diffusion, not osmosis.