How Everyday Routines Reveal the Hidden Order of the Universe?

-Karthik Gurumurthy

Your daily routine is pretty predictable when you think about it—setting your alarm at night, grabbing a shower in the morning, brushing your teeth, having breakfast, paying bills on time, and buckling up in the car. Each of these simple actions (and countless others throughout your day) shows that you actually rely on the power of predictability. Skip the alarm and you’ll probably be late for work. Skip the seatbelt and end up in a freeway accident, and the consequences could be fatal.

We all crave order to help us navigate life’s uncertainties. We’re constantly looking for patterns that make sense of things. Scientists do exactly the same thing, but they’re guided by one big idea:

“The universe is regular and predictable.”

The universe isn’t just random chaos. Humans can actually figure out how it works and even discover the basic, elegant laws that run the show. That’s what we call “science.”

Science is one way of understanding our world. The whole scientific enterprise rests on the belief that there are general laws out there—laws that our minds can discover—governing everything in the physical universe. At its most sophisticated level, science speaks in mathematics, which can feel pretty intimidating to most of us. But like any language, scientific ideas can be translated into plain English. When that happens, everyone gets to appreciate the beauty and simplicity of nature’s great laws.

Our ancestors saw the universe very differently than we do. For most of human history, people viewed the world as a chaotic place without deep order or rules—just governed by chance. But by watching the daily movements of objects in the sky, they began to notice something amazing: the sun’s path, the moon’s phases, and the major star patterns cycled through their changes with incredible regularity over days, years, decades, and centuries. Whatever controls its motion, the sun really does come up every morning.

Most science historians believe that the need for a reliable calendar to guide farming was what drove early astronomical discoveries. Early astronomy told people when to plant their crops and gave humanity its first formal way of tracking time. Stonehenge—that 4,000-year-old ring of stones in southern Britain—is probably the most famous monument to this discovery of regularity and predictability in our world. The massive stones point to exact spots on the horizon where the sun rises during solstices and equinoxes—the same dates we still use to mark the changing seasons. The stones might even have been used to predict eclipses. The fact that Stonehenge was built by people who couldn’t even write tells us something profound about both nature’s regularity and the human mind’s ability to look past surface appearances and find deeper meaning in events.

Stonehenge worked because of the regular, predictable movements of the sun, moon, and stars—it was essentially a giant calendar. During solstices and equinoxes, sunlight or moonlight aligns perfectly with the stones, marking the passage of time.

Science: The Beginning

Astronomy was humanity’s first science. Throughout history, some of our brightest minds have tried to make sense of what they saw in the sky. Most of their theories shared one thing in common—they assumed Earth was special somehow, and that what happened up in the heavens had nothing to do with what happened down here on our planet.