On Entropy – A Review

When you asked me what was on my mind, I shook my head, half to answer you and half to bring me back to the here and now. My mind often goes on tangents. It takes me away from the moment and flings me back or sometimes forward. Or sometimes sideways.

Today I am sideways. I am thinking about how nice all of this is, but that one day you and me won’t be us. We’ll be dust suspended in space. Our individual pieces will be lightyears from one another. Scattered so far from everything that gravity can only barely pull us any which way. My mind is on entropy. And how it is the natural order of things.

But to me, entropy is not natural. Chaos, destruction, heat, they all feel natural to me. But entropy doesn’t. Entropy feels like a direction. The inevitability of it makes it feel necessary, or at the very least, predictable. Nature isn’t any of that. When I think of nature, I don’t feel like there’s a “direction.” I don’t feel like it is necessary, even. And I certainly don’t see it as predictable.

All of this is to say, I struggle with entropy being labeled as the “natural” order of things. To me, it makes little sense.

Entropy, so we’re all working on the same page, is a scientific term that refers to the disorder of a system. Within physics there is a principle that, when given enough time, energy within a system will evenly spread out, and that’s entropy. This is a contradiction in some ways, because while entropy might look like disorder/chaos, in reality it is a level playing field. Something that’s been on my mind lately.

Entropy is fair. It is when all the energy (potential or otherwise) finally settles at its simplest, heat. This is where the concept of “heat death” comes from. Heat death refers to a system at maximum entropy, aka, a system in which the only energy is heat. There’s no friction, no gravity, no momentum. If you think about, heat is kind of always radiating out of everything we do.

When describing entropy and the eventual heat death of the universe, I like to talk about how sparks are made through friction. Friction, of course, being the force of an object in motion meeting another object. A force applied to force. The force of one object pressing against another vying for some sort of leverage doesn’t just translate into momentum or acceleration or what have you. When your foot hits the ground and you exert energy to push yourself against it. Friction moves you forward, but some of that energy is lost and becomes heat.

The dissipation of heat happens constantly through all sorts of forces working on each other. Lightbulbs and fire produce light, but also heat. Electricity in general is energy, but leaves metal warm. And when I rub my hand against your back, it too leaves heat. And you can feel it there, even when my hand is gone. Its an impression of what once was.

This is why entropy cannot be natural. It comes after nature, but it is not representative of it.

For 3.7 billion years cells have been working to produce order. They come together and take energy and use it to make something. This is nature doing the opposite of entropy. It is creation. Of course, in order to create, you have to destroy. People need to eat. Houses need to be built. The wilds need some taming. But in many ways, this is an additional set of order. An additional cycle. Soon the wood from your house will rot and become part of the mulch that can grow something else. Soon my hand will be on your back again, and yours maybe on mine, and we’ll embrace and our heat will intermingle and we will produce warmth together. But of course, nature is chaotic. We won’t know what our heats will do to one another. In fact, we won’t know anything of what’s happening in the trees behind the cold walls we’re so desperately trying to warm.

You cannot look at the rows that mark the outside of a pineapple and see chaos. They are a perfect diamond checker spiraling up with mathematical purpose. Anyone who can look at that and assume the laws of the universe will allow all matter to dissolve until the space becomes a blanket of evenly spaced atomic sand is crazy. That is not nature. That is oblivion.

Heat death is a misnomer. If entropy wins out billions of years from now, the universe won’t be hot. It’ll be freezing. There won’t be anything to freeze though. Hot and cold is just a clever way to describe molecules moving. Heat death is when they finally stop and settle. Consider a jar of jelly beans. Shake the jar and they all rattle but eventually settle according to gravity. Now, imagine the jar is filled with the world’s firmest Jell-O. And the jelly beans are all spread evenly apart from another. Shake the jar and the jelly beans remain equally distant, locked in place.

Without introducing something new to the system, a cosmic push, the jelly beans will remain distant. Now replace the jelly beans with individual atoms. They cannot come together to form a molecule, let alone a singularity dense enough to restart things with a big bang. The keys are in the ignition, but the car is disassembled.

But. Don’t fret. If this is to happen it wouldn’t happen for a long time. Additionally, it is just one of many theories of how things could come to an end. On top of all of this, it assumes we know that the universe is a closed system. But it is constantly expanding. Who’s to say what demons might be out there when things start to slow down around here.

There is a way to romanticize entropy, which I briefly alluded to. Simplicity is something often cited as being taken for granted. Simplicity is not something easily afforded. It usually comes at great cost to someone, whether that’s your parents, you previously, or some community effort. According to entropy, the path we’re on start

ed at complicated and leads toward simple. And so, there is some odd not-perfectly-comfortable solace in this fact.

There’s also comfortability in knowing that entropy, in many ways, proves that nothing is perfect. If you can’t even open a pickle jar without accidentally introducing more heat into the universe, well, does it really matter if you’re not saying the exact right thing at the exact right time?

Of course, these Byronic thoughts really mean little when considering the idea that entropy doesn’t really care what you think. But in the meantime, I suppose we can enjoy the beauty it accidentally represents and the warmth it leaves behind.

And that’s where I’m at. I have been distant all week. The stress of it all is getting to me. But I’m brought back out of respect and an unsaid debt to your kindness. Your image grounds me. And I’m here with you. Back in the moment entirely. A few minutes later a smile sneaks across my face as I think, “if this isn’t nice. I don’t know what is.”

Thanks for reading -- and have a great weekend!