Today, while we are taking the modern lifestyle provided by civilisation for granted, how many of us ever wonder what civilisation is? Do we really understand its nature?
To understand the nature of civilisation, we need to look into its whole process: civilisation is a product of human behaviour; human behaviour is driven by decision-making; decision-making is influenced by the human nature and the knowledge. As such, human nature and knowledge drive our behaviours to create civilisation. Thus, human nature and knowledge are the driving forces of civilisation.
As force is a vector, it has direction. Then, a question is raised: what is the direction of civilisation? Furthermore, any moving object has its own speed, so this concept is translated into the term of “the pace of civilisation”. As the speed of a moving object is influenced by the driving force and the resistance, then the pace of civilisation is influenced by “the driving force of civilisation” and “the resistance of civilisation”.
This new approach to study civilisation by using Newtonian Mechanics is termed “Social Mechanics” which is a part of the “Physical Sociology”. Apart from this, another approach is taken: human anatomy, physiology and embryology as well as evolutionary biology are used to study social structure, activity and development. As humans have the most successful and advanced body control mechanism through its 4.2 billion years of evolution, it provides a perfect model to understand how civilisation (only 8000 years of history) evolves. Their similarities provide an effective way to study civilisation.
Upon further observation, you might notice that society not only bears amazing similarities to the human body but cosmic phenomena as well: the rise and fall of the Sun, the expansion and collapse of an empire; the collision of galaxies and conflict of civilisations. Behind these phenomena, lie a common mechanism that fundamentally governs everything in the universe.
This common mechanism can be expressed by a mathematical model representing the fundamental laws of physics. Through presenting evidences, it is demonstrated that not only lifeless events follow these laws but the intelligence-driven civilisation as well. As such, all developments in a society including technologies and their consequential social development follow these laws. By using these laws and the aforementioned approaches, many unsolved questions have been successfully answered: the uncertain social development has been predicted; the mystery that the Greeks achieved a brilliant civilisation was deciphered; the puzzle that scientific revolution happened in the West first has been solved; the mechanism behind the rise of the Western civilisation has been unearthed; the enigma of elusive beauty has been unequivocally unlocked and many more…
Finally, comes the conclusion: human civilisation is a part of the evolution of the universe. The laws governing the universe also govern human civilisation.
