The Serenity Prayer as a Universal Equation

I first ran into the Serenity Prayer in the rooms of AA, and it quickly became a treasured part of my life. It is my daily formula for peace of mind that I use to keep me grounded in the moment. In recent years, I've developed an interest in modern physics: I became fascinated with Einstein's work, but I could never seem to wrap my mind around the new realities of time and space that his predictions had uncovered. In the course of my reading, aside from gaining a better grasp of physics, I also gained an appreciation for the beauty of scientific equations. One day, at the close of a meeting, I was reciting the Serenity Prayer with the others in the room and it occurred to me that the prayer was askin to a mathematical equation--that it had a powerful symmetry to it that conveyed a kind of universal law. In science, equation are used to convey a universal truth that can be verified through experiment and that comes to be accepted as a "Law of Nature." Equations are the end result of a long process. After years of reflection, painstaking scientific research, and hard work, a scientist arrives at the formulation of an equation: a statement asserting the equality of two expressions. Einstein's E=mc2, perhaps the most famous equation of all time, tells us that mass and energy are interchangeable.