Bland Pudding Entropy formal definition = The tendency of any energy system to move from a state of organization to one of disorganization. Recently I was perched on a pedestrian walkway straddling Light St. in Baltimore as the flow of downtown traffic trickled between my legs. A couple of blocks away the historic McCormick Spice Factory building, a Baltimore landmark for 70 years, was being demolished. The McCormick building was a friendly fixture in the Baltimore skyline, white concrete in a vaguely Bauhaus style, the McCormick building regularly sent wafts of sweet-smelling spices through the air of the Inner Harbor whenever a new batch of some exotic spice was being processed. From blocks away, the scents of cinnamon, clove, ginger, allspice, and dozens of other flavors from far away lands, perfumed Baltimore's air. A marvelous community service I always thought. And in the winter the good people at McCormick set up tables in front of the building with huge samovars of hot tea for people who happened by. A more recognizable form of community service. But on this Fall day the McCormick Spice Factory was being demolished, turned to rubble by the ponderous movements of an iron wrecking ball. The long metal framework of the crane, with its heavy ball suspended by a steel cable from the pivot-point at the top, produced an odd, slow-motion kind of spastic movement. The crane tower would slowly turn back away from the building, then lurch forward and suddenly stop, and when it had stopped the wrecking ball would surge forward, reflecting the initial motion long after that motion had disappeared. Presumably it would eventually stop, matching the crane's second action, but the walls of the McCormick Spice Factory got in the way. The wrecking ball, in its effort to reach a state of rest, instead came crashing forward, turning McCormick's powder-white walls into powder. The still cold air and the surrounding traffic muffled any sound, making the whole procedure a jerky spasm in pantomime. The delayed effect of the wrecking ball lagging behind the crane tower produced a queer kind of disjointed intention. It seemed as if the crane intended to move this way and that, but it couldn't get the wrecking ball to go along right away. The indirect mechanical linkages introduced a delay at each stage of the mechanism--a little entropy in the works. I realize now what a lie Rube Goldberg told us with those marvelously complicated drawings of his. Despite their amusing complexity, all the links seemed causally tight. The shoe kicked the ball, and the ball rolled down the incline to tip over the candle, which lit the rope, which dropped the brick, which . . . If we ever actually constructed one of those ingenious devices, we would see right away that it produced unsatisfying results because the causal links would be weakened at every remove. We would feel cheated somehow because the sense of connection would be broken. You see, Rube Goldberg failed to take account of the pervasive power of entropy. Entropy. The concept of entropy comes to us courtesy of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law holds that, on the whole, any sufficiently large energy system tends toward ever increasing states of disorganization and decay. Any structure, any clump of organized matter, requires energy to maintain it. Without a constant supply of energy, organization cannot be maintained. One such sufficiently large energy system is the universe. Cosmologists tell us that the universe, on the whole, is winding down. The high degree of organization we see on the earth is strictly a neighborhood affair. The universe is in gradual decline. To stop it is impossible. To even slow it down locally from time to time requires an enormous input of energy. The universe will eventually diffuse to a fine, uniform energy mist. Organization or structure can also be thought of as information. The fact that a clump of energy is organized means it contains information. The tendency of everything to unwind is then also the tendency of information to dissipate. The universe beginning to unknow. There is a familiar canard which goes: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It would be hard to find an insight less insightful. The fact is, everything in the universe is broken. It is a constant struggle to try and hold things together long enough for them to be useful. If anything is not being constantly improved, then it is becoming more broken by the moment. So the universe is rapidly evolving toward a pile of rubble. Our tiny little eddy of order is just a local disturbance, a momentary aberration in the scheme of things. A kind of congealed lump in the otherwise bland pudding of cosmic space/time. And it takes lots and lots of energy just to keep things stuck in stable-looking chunks. On the whole, the universe is lazy, and getting lazier all the time. If you look at the big picture, and I mean the REALLY BIG PICTURE, you will see that everything tends to run downhill. The stuff of the universe is slumping toward a sloppy mess. All the straining, heaving, sighing efforts we make will someday soon join the McCormick Spice Factory as so much dust on the earth. And the earth itself will become just so much dust in the heavens. And the very heavens themselves will grind to a halt and collapse into a featureless mist. Kinda puts things in perspective doesn't it? |