Saint Venant's Principle And Our Insignificance

We are all so absorbed by the happenings around us, that we feel, the events happening "Now" and "Here" are the ones which matter at all. Have we ever paused to think, what significance, these events will have, if we view them from a vantage point far removed in space and time?

We are tickled by the "Accountant-Businessman" in St. Exupery's "The Little Prince", who does not have a moments respite from his occupation of counting and enumerating stars, which he believes will belong to him, once he has recorded them in his ledger. This seems humorous to us, because we think of stars as too far away to be owned by any one. Pondering on this a little deeper, we can understand how utterly insignificant we and are affairs are, when viewed on the cosmological scale, and our insatiable desire to "own" is ludicrous indeed.

Study of "Cause" and "Effect" has occupied human thought through the ages. When ever the causal link could be established with a degree of certainty, we have cried "Eureka". At other times we have been stupefied at "disproportionate" effects of small causes. The title from the seminal paper by Edward Lorenz, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" succinctly called the "Butterfly Effect", describes the import of small triggers in causal relationships in chaotic systems .

In Structural Mechanics, which is a study of "Loads" and their effect on "Structures", predictions would have been extremely difficult, but for the "Saint Venant's Principle", which essentially states in layman's language that, at distances sufficiently far from the actual area of application of load, the "type" of load is immaterial, only its "value" matters.

In our lives too, we can see the principle at work. When ever we are faced with a situation, where we feel cornered, we can get solace, by just remembering, that as time passes, all that is happening will have no significance at all. If we get the perspective right, every thing seems insignificant, and we realise, how puny, we and our actions are.