by Madeleine KandoEntropy means that something reverts back to chaos. The word ‘chaos’, in my mind, conjures up visions of a lot of random, wild activity. Chaos is the opposite of orderliness. According to the laws of physics, however, a maximum level of entropy means that something is in such perfect equilibrium, that nothing ever happens. Our universe is expanding and increasing in entropy. Eventually everything will be so spread out and so perfectly distributed that the universe will be frozen in stillness.
I look at the human body for instance. If it is in perfect physical balance,(right side is exactly equal to the left side weight distribution wise), the body stops moving. It is just there, like a piece of wood. You need imbalance to be able to move about. Try taking a step without shifting your weight and you’ll know what I mean. So perfect balance, perfect uniformity, perfect heat distribution inside a container.. we call that high entropy states? Mmmm.
My dog Max has very low entropy. While he is alive, he has a ‘Maxness’ about him. But when he expires, the ‘Maxness’ will be added to the high entropy soup from which we all came.
Even I am quickly approaching that high chaos state. I can feel my ‘Madeleine-ness’ starting to dissipate somewhat. Ten years ago my eyesight was perfectly organized to meet the demands of seeing my computer. Now that my eyes have higher entropy, I need low entropy glasses to be able to read the nonsense that I am typing.
Is this the fate of our species? If the rule applies to the entire universe, I am sure it applies to the human race as well. Take information, for instance. Not too long ago, in order to find some important information, I had to lug myself to the library, spend a good amount of time searching for a certain oeuvre, actually read the whole damn thing before I could say: ‘ah, now I have the answer to my question’.
Now I google ‘find me this’ and plouf, there are 500 entries on ‘find me this’, all proclaiming to be the authority on the subject. The problem is that the information is filtered, processed, changed, decoded, encoded, re-encoded… to such an extent that the final result is buried in irrelevant, ambiguous, complicated, cluttered, and overloaded garbage. (This essay is the exception, of course).
Ah, the good old days of low-entropy… where have they gone? Is this why we cannot seem to pass any reasonable health care bill? Obama’s proposal was a sound, ‘low entropy’ plan. In fact, it might have been too low-entropy, too organized, too complicated for our poor high-entropy muddled minds.
So, a word of warning: the longer we wait in doing anything, be it passing a health-care bill, reading important information before it morphs into useless high-entropy garbage (this blog is the exception, of course), or enjoying your low-entropy eye-sight, let’s do it soon. Let’s do it before Mr. high-entropy comes a-knocking and distributes every last ounce of low-entropy, evenly and fairly and makes it totally useless. leave comment here
2 comments:
I enjoyed Madeleine’s posting, "The Law of Entropy." One of my alumni magazines recently addressed the same subject, including an article by Dr. Sean Carroll, taken from his recent book, "From Eternity to Here, The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time." He makes the usual observation that while the "fundamental laws of physics are reversible, that is–symmetric with respect to past and future time–the time we actually experience has a definite direction" (the arrow of time.) This simply means that the time used in most physics equations is only a mathematical representation of time, which does not have all of the properties of "real" time. The assumption that entropy always increases in the universe as a whole, based upon our observations and analysis of local phenomena, has many interesting consequences. Sean further writes: ..."our notion of free will, the ability to change the future by making choices in a way that is not available to us as far as the past is concerned, is only possible because the past has a low[er] entropy and the future has a high[er] entropy." At first, this might seem counter-intuitive, because, as we get older, we usually experience a diminishing set of possible choices. However, these choices still exist–the problem is simply that other earlier "choices" made by the cells and various parts of our bodies during the aging process have already increased our entropy, rendering certain possibilities inaccessible to us. In any case, it is easier to change the future than the past!
Wouldn't it be awesome to change the past? Those 5 days some of us had to camp at the airport while the Eyjafjallajökull volcano was spewing ash.. erased! Replaced by 5 days on a Hawaiian beach. There would be no need to change the future at all. All it would take would be to wait until it became the past.
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