On Entropy

In lecture last quarter my professor mildly remarked that the second law of thermodynamics did not always apply. The second law of thermodynamics states that “the entropy of an isolated system never decreases; the entropy either increases, until the system reaches equilibrium, or, if the system began in equilibrium, stays the same.” Entropy is the concept that all things tend toward disorder – a cup breaking, ice melting, perfume smelled from a distance, the choas of your room on a bad day. Imagine you have two bags of marbles – one black and one white. If you cast both bags onto a table, the two colors will not remain separate but will tend toward disorder, scattering randomly. Shake the table a bit and the system starts toward equilibrium, with the marbles scattered relatively uniformly.

And yet, my professor pointed out a key exception: from a chemical soup arose humans – highly complex beings. Through the mechanism of evolution, random, chance events have actually (on our planet, at least) tended towards order. This draws on the concept of “emergent systems,” the idea that highly complex structures can arise from the combination of simply programmed agents. This can apply to the way that a school of fish swim, the way ant colonies operate, or the way neurons fire in your brain.

In addition, it seems doubtful that we are progressing toward equilibrium on the planet. Though we began with a fairly homogenous system of molten, we are now driven by disequilibrium – specifically, by the disequilibrium the sun creates when it warms our equators more than our poles. By this logic, we are tending away from equilibrium and toward some type of order.

I grew up mostly atheist and though the harshness of death and the vastness of the universe often frightened me, I now find myself perhaps more disturbed by the possibility of a meaning beyond our comprehension. The nice thing about entropy and atheism is that if everything is tending toward disorder, you don’t need anyone or anything driving the system. But if we are instead tending toward order, this implies the need for a driving force. At least in human experience, order arises from effort; governments form after many people get together and organize and write documents and choose leaders. This type of human induced order appears to require effort, but also arises from a fundamental attribute of humans – that humans like order and strive toward it. If then, that idea holds in the greater context of the universe, something (a God or force of some type?) is exerting effort toward our planet that is driving the order. If it is instead not the case that order demands effort, then for some unknown unexplained reason, order arises naturally. In either case, order of some type is imposed upon us and yet we do not understand what type of order this is or why it exists.