A Lesson in Thermodynamics
Hope McGovern
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that systems tend
toward disorder. Wood burns to ash and scatters in the wind, ice
cubes melt on a countertop, and your bedroom floor becomes
gradually more cluttered because of this universal tendency to-
wards chaos we call entropy.
Yet this stuffy law that ostensibly describes heat transfer holds
deeper philosophical ramifications. We die because of entropy.
Our bodies break down and wither away. Empires turn to dust
and great leaders are toppled. To a cynical eye, entropy means
that you can never win. There is a limit to how much you can
achieve, how effective you can be, and how long anything can
be sustained. In a word, it is inevitability.
However, the law of entropy is not an immutable property of
the universe like the electromagnetic force or general relativity.
It’s a statement of statistics. It doesn’t have to be true; there’s no
physical reason why ash doesn’t spontaneously reassemble into a
log or Kool-Aid powder suddenly un-mix itself from your drink,
other than that it’s statistically unlikely. There are so many more
possible ways for a system to be chaotic than ordered that chaos
always wins out. For this reason, entropy is called an arrow of
time. Every other physical law works just the same backwards
and forwards, but not entropy. The Second Law of Thermody-
namics tells us that we are always moving irrevocably further
away from a perfect world.
But there is always nuance. Rarely do structures degrade from
order to utter chaos without forming some intermediate ordered
structure. Stars tear through the atoms that keep them burning
and collapse to form neutron stars or black holes, which them-
selves are ordered. An egg shatters to reveal a chicklet, a more
highly structured being which is also more chaotic than an in-
animate egg. In little miracles, such as these, we see a desire for
any facsimile of order bucking against the grain. In short, we
live in a universe that is shouting out for order while running
inevitably towards chaos.
If entropy should be part of our physical intuition, it is more
than a passing curiosity that the entirety of human endeavor
has been to combat it. We herald myths of perpetual motion
machines, fountains of youth, long-lasting phone batteries, even
while the ethos of the universe is that nothing lasts forever. Still,
we push back against the inevitable. We hope that our children
will never outgrow bedtime stories; we fight to forge our lega-
cies; we build empires thinking they will withstand the test of
18 Spring 2017
time. But children grow up, and all that remains of Ozymandias
are trunkless legs of stone. Entropy says it must be so.
We feel wronged that things must come to an end, that we must
die, that everything we love must break down, even though this
is the natural order. Entropy is “Out, out, brief candle!”, the
realization of our mortality played out on a cosmic stage. All
of our enterprises and natural sentiments bespeak a desire for
something that is nowhere to be found in our universe: eterni-
ty. We seem to yearn for perfection and permanence, having
glimpsed only in reverse a pilgrimage towards a perfect world.
We, with the universe itself, groan against the steady descent
into chaos because we feel it should not be so. Surely, the arrow
of time must point to something beyond, where everything that
was once broken is restored and perfected. Entropy means that
written into the very fabric of our dying universe is a call to
Heaven.
Hope McGovern is sophomore concentrating in Engineering-Physics.