Entropy — The engine of life’s problems
Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
This life is annoying. It causes trouble and makes thing difficult. Problems are everywhere but their solutions need you to be attentive, spend energy, and make efforts. I don’t think that life just works out for anyone; if anything, it becomes more complicated over time to decline into chaos.
Why is that?
Murphy’s Law (pop culture reference — Nolan’s Interstellar) might be a trite conversation, but it is a fundamental part of one of the great forces of our universe affecting everything that we do. This force fuels many issues which we face and leads our world away from the structure into disarray. This great force is called Entropy.
What is Entropy and does it really matter?
To understand entropy, take a box of puzzle pieces. If you don’t have one, imagine that you do. Dump the pieces out of the box onto a table. Theoretically, there are chances for the pieces to fall in a way that completes the puzzle. Realistically, it will never happen.
(If it happened with you, leave a comment! )
Why?
Because the odds are overwhelmingly against it. Every piece would need to fall in just the right manner at the right spot to complete the puzzle. There is only one possible situation where every piece is in order but there are (nearly) an infinite number of states where the pieces are in disorder. If you understand mathematics, you know that an ordered outcome is tremendously unlikely to occur randomly.
There are other scenarios to understand this as well. Think about the last time you built a sandcastle on a beach. Now try to remember, if it was there when you visited that beach again? Probably, no because there is only one possible arrangement of sand particles that looks like your castle and an infinite number of arrangements that don’t. Well, you can say that the wind and the waves may move the sand around and conjure the shape of your castle but you know you are kidding no one. The odds are colossally high that sand will be lying there in a random clump.
These familiar thought experiments allow us to fathom entropy — it is a measure of randomness, of disorder, and there will always be far more disorderly arrangements than the orderly ones. Also, it does not stop here.
Important note about entropy: it always increases over time.
It is natural for things to lose order with time — sandcastles get washed away, desktops clutter, ruins crumble, metals rust, people age, even the mountains erode and become round — things become less and less organized. In the long run, nothing escapes the pull of entropy. It is relentless. Everything decays. Disorder always increases.
“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature.”
— Arthur Eddington
No effort = No order
Lose hope, do not. Good news, there is!
The good news is that you can fight the pull of entropy. You can solve a scattered puzzle. You can pull the weeds out. You can organize the files on your desktop. You can form a cohesive team with difficult individuals.
But because your world is sliding towards disorder, you will have to expend energy to bring order and stability. Without efforts, things will decay. I believe that counteracting the increase in universal disorder through consciously spending energy is one of the core purposes of life. We must make efforts to bring about useful orders that are resilient enough in the face of entropy. Successful relationships take efforts from both partners. Top sports teams need their players to practice continuously. Business empires can not stay empires if their employees don’t strive.
“The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.”
— Steven Pinker
Entropy Everyday
Entropy might help explain many secrets and experiences of daily life.
You are living a remarkable life.
Consider the human body.
There is a virtually infinite number of arrangements for the collection of atoms that make up your body and all but one of them lead to no form of life. The mathematician in me tells me that the odds are against your very presence and yet here you are. You are truly remarkable in a world ruled by entropy!
We witness beautiful art.
Entropy might be the explanation for why art and beauty are so aesthetically pleasing. Artists generate order and symmetry from randomness, which the universe might never generate on its own. The number of beautiful combinations is infinitesimally small against the total combinations. This might also explain why symmetrical faces are perceived as rare and beautiful — there are just too many asymmetrical faces out there.
Families are difficult.
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy.
There are many ways a family can fall apart — financial stress, parenting issues, crazy relatives, conflicts in core values, lack of trust, and so on. A deficiency in any one of these areas can wreck a family. But you need some amount of success in each area to be happy. I don’t know this for sure but we might observe a similar structure in all the happy families if we research them because the disorder can occur in so many ways, but order in only a few.
The Universe & Murphy’s Law
Finally, let’s return to Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
You did not get fired from the job because the planets were misaligned or some cosmic force is bringing you bad luck. It is simply entropy at work — there are more ways things can go wrong than right. Entropy is Murphy’s law applied to the whole universe.
It is not your or someone else’s fault that life has problems. It is mathematics. It is a law of probability. And if the odds are anything to go by, it is not surprising that life has problems, but that we can solve any of them at all.
