ENTROPY : WHAT IS IT AND HOW IT REPRESENTS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR CREATIVITY ?
A brief look into entropy.
The second law of Thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease over time. Entropy is a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work. It is often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system. For example, when milk is poured into coffee, the molecules become mixed and disordered, and will never randomly separate back into coffee and milk. This happens because of disorder, without external input, is statistically more probable than order.
Entropy in society and everyday life.
Entropy can be observed everywhere. Life always seems to get more complicated. A home left uncleaned will become cluttered and disordered. People age, their faces changing as their hair turns grey, once-tidy gardens become overgrown, buildings crack and deteriorate and relationships fall apart.
Without constant maintenance from a stable government, an organised economy, law enforcement, infrastructure and education, societies themselves will tend towards chaos.
Ignorance of entropy is responsible for many of our biggest mistakes and failures. We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. To maintain our health, relationships, careers, skills and possessions requires never-ending effort. Order is always artificial and temporary.
Disorder is not a mistake, but a default. A world without entropy would be a world without innovation and creativity as there would be no sense of urgency and need for progress.
“Organisms organise. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetise books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such a process, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy,
piece by piece, bit by bit. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quintoxic purpose in the universe".
“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature.” —Arthur Eddington
Murphy's Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
Entropy provides a good explanation for why Murphy’s Law seems to pop up so frequently in life. There are more ways things can go wrong than right. The difficulties of life do not occur because the planets are misaligned or because some cosmic force is conspiring against you. It is simply entropy at work. As one scientist put it, “Entropy is sort of like Murphy's Law applied to the entire universe.”
It is nobody's fault that life has problems. It is simply a law of probability. There are many disordered states and few ordered ones. Given the odds against us, what is remarkable is not that life has problems, but that we can solve them at all.
Why Art is Beautiful ?
Entropy offers a good explanation for why art and beauty are so aesthetically pleasing. Artists create a form of order and symmetry that, odds are, the universe would never generate on its own. It is so rare in the grand scheme of possibilities. The number of beautiful combinations is far less than the number of total combinations. Similarly, seeing a symmetrical face is rare and beautiful when there are so many ways for a face to be asymmetrical.
Beauty is rare and unlikely in a universe of disorder. And this gives us good reason to protect art. We should guard it and treat it as something sacred.
