How to explain the “cause and effect” in this example?

How to explain and/or describe the causality in this example (scientifically?)

Socrates has an idea (that if applied has a strong impact, influence)
Plato writes it down in a book.

Both die.

2000 years pass.

I find the book, manage to understand what is written, read it.

I apply the idea which then has a strong impact, influence.

How to explain the different causality links between the original “cause” (Socrates has an idea) and the final effect (in this example, which stops at:) which is that my “application” of the idea has?

Ideas are bullet proof.

Details :

The 2.4k years isn’t the focus of my question, rather it is an illustration of how the cause and effect in this specific case is independent from time.

(apart from the physical decay of the ink and paper, there is no “loss” of whatever influential potential Socrates’ idea has through time. Not only that, but whatever the state of decay of the ink and the paper, provided the idea can still be read and understood, is irrelevant isn’t it?)

I would add, whatever the state of the words on paper (in absolute terms, whether they are physically ink on paper, a sound recording, a recording on a magnetic tape, numeric 1s and 0s or any other “medium”) is irrelevant provided the words and idea are understood.

In addition, were the idea to be copied regularly, thus changing form again and again, the actual source of influence (as I imagine it because it is abstract in my mind) would remain intact.

If I had read that book 1 year after Socrates had written it or 30k years after, the effect would have been (relatively) the same.

(relatively because I’m presuming context would influence the application of the idea a lot, but “all other things being the same”, it would have been identical).

The “material” form mutates from whatever form an idea has (wouldn’t know to be honest, I might suggest whatever form Socrates’ brain activity has at the particular time when the idea “appears” in his brain) to “ink on paper” (which potentially could have an almost infinite number of other forms since this can be scanned on computer, numerised, translated and so on) to whatever form that idea has once it’s in my brain which then “moves” me to apply it and have an effect (worth noting that how I apply the idea is also a huge variable that varies “independently” from most things on which Socrates’ idea affects since how it turns out “in reality” is unpredictable from Socrates’ point of view if my “free will” has anything to do with it).

I can’t see how it could be explained in terms of :

a) gravity
b) strong or weak nuclear forces
c) electromagnetism

And with regards to anything else I know of (the relation between mass and energy for example) there’s nothing that I know that I can use to explain this either.

When an object is travelling at a certain speed and is obstructed, the energy is transformed, transferred into various things, heat, noise, destruction or division of the object and so on.

When you clap your hands, there is a physical causality link that can be traced between the movement of your hands and the resulting sound.

Energy is never lost, it is only transformed (the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content, mass is a property of all energy and energy is a property of all mass, and the two properties are connected by a constant.) (((E=mc2)))

In relativity, all of the energy that moves along with an object (that is, all the energy which is present in the object’s rest frame) contributes to the total mass of the body, which measures how much it resists acceleration. Each potential and kinetic energy makes a proportional contribution to the mass. As noted above, even if a box of ideal mirrors “contains” light, then the individually massless photons still contribute to the total mass of the box, by the amount of their energy divided by c2.
(source : wikipedia)

Right?

So how does the energy and/or mass of an idea (assuming an idea has energy) transform without losing any of its potential, again, irrespective of the time scale, potentially an infinite amount of times, only to result in a specific “effect” (EDIT : “effect” that would be equal irrespective of time and the form in which the idea is communicated assuming “all other things remain the same” and the idea itself is read and understood) ?

Because if the above is true AND if the hypothesis that an idea can be the cause of an effect, then it seems to me that this necessarily means that “an idea” has no mass, no energy, is not composed of matter. In fact, in physician terms, it lieterarly does not exist.

Yet it can have an important influence on matter/energy/mass.

Which, if it is true, proves (unless I am mistaken) that to define reality with regards to “physical” terms is false since how could anyone argue that something which is influencing reality “does not exist”?