ENTROPY: BEHAVIOURS THAT IMPACT OUR LIVES

Murphy’s Law states, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” This pithy statement references the annoying tendency of life to cause trouble and make things difficult. Problems seem to arise naturally on their own, while solutions always require our attention, energy, and effort. Life never seems to just work itself out for us. If anything, our lives become more complicated and gradually decline into disorder rather than remaining simple and structured.

Why is that? Murphy’s Law is just a common adage that people toss around in conversation, but it is related to one of the great forces of our universe. This force is so fundamental to the way our world works that it permeates nearly every endeavour we pursue. It drives many of the problems we face and leads to disarray. It is the one force that governs everybody’s life: Entropy.

What is Entropy and Why Does It Matter?
One simple way to think about it could be: Imagine that we take a box of puzzle pieces and dump them out on a table. In theory, it is possible for the pieces to fall perfectly into place and create a completed puzzle when you dump them out of the box. But in reality, that never happens. Why? Quite simply because the odds are overwhelmingly against it. Every piece would have to fall in just the right spot to create a completed puzzle. There is only one possible state where every piece is in order, but there are a nearly infinite number of states where the pieces are in disorder. Mathematically speaking, an orderly outcome is incredibly unlikely to happen at random.

Similarly, if we build a sand castle on the beach and return a few days later, it will no longer be there. There is only one combination of sand particles that looks like our sandcastle. Meanwhile, there are a nearly infinite number of combinations that don’t look like it. Again, in theory, it is possible for the wind and waves to move the sand around and create the shape of our sandcastle. But in practice, it never happens. The odds are astronomically higher that sand will be scattered into a random clump.

These simple examples capture the essence of entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder. And there are always far more disorderly variations than orderly ones.

How does Entropy Connect to Our Lives?
The important thing about entropy: it always increases over time. It is the natural tendency of things to lose order. Left to its own devices, life will always become less structured. Sand castles get washed away. Weeds overtake gardens. Cars begin to rust. People gradually age. Even our surroundings get disorganized. With enough time, even mountains erode, and their precise edges become rounded. The inevitable trend is that things become less organized. This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is one of the foundational concepts of chemistry and it is one of the fundamental laws of our universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease.

“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature.” — Arthur Eddington. In the long run, nothing escapes the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The pull of entropy is relentless. Everything decays. Disorder always increases. The Key: Without Effort, Life Tends to Lose Order.

We can fight back against the pull of entropy. We can solve a scattered puzzle, pull the weeds out of the garden, clean a messy room, or, importantly, organize individuals into a cohesive team. But because the universe naturally slides toward disorder, we have to expend energy to create stability, structure, and simplicity. Successful relationships require care and attention, just as successful houses require cleaning and maintenance. Successful teams require communication and collaboration. Without effort, things will decay.

Maintaining organization in the face of chaos is not easy. This insight — that disorder has a natural tendency to increase over time and that we can counteract that tendency by expending energy — reveals the core purpose of life. We must exert effort to create useful types of order that are resilient enough to withstand the unrelenting pull of entropy.

“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 will always increase on its own. The only way to make things orderly again is to add energy. Order requires effort.

Entropy in Daily Life
Entropy helps explain many of the mysteries and experiences of daily life. Here are some just to help understand its play in our lives.

Consider the human body. The collection of atoms that make up our body could be arranged in a virtually infinite number of ways and nearly all of them lead to no form of life whatsoever. Mathematically speaking, the odds are overwhelmingly against our very presence. We are a very unlikely combination of atoms. And yet, here we are. In a universe where entropy rules the day, the presence of life with such organization, structure, and stability is stunning.

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. 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.

Why Marriage is Difficult. One of the most famous opening lines in literature comes from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. He writes, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” There are many ways a marriage can fail — financial stress, parenting issues, crazy in-laws, conflicts in core values, lack of trust, infidelity, and so on. A deficiency in any one of these areas can wreck a family. To be happy, however, we need some degree of success in each major area. Thus, all happy families are alike because they all have a similar structure. Disorder can occur in many ways, but order, in only a few.

Therefore: Optimal Lives Are Designed Not Discovered.

We all have a combination of talents, skills, and interests that are specific to us. But we also live in a larger society and culture that were not designed with our specific abilities in mind. Given what we know about entropy, what could the odds be of the environment we happen to grow up in is also the optimal environment for our talents? It is very unlikely that life is going to present us with a situation that perfectly matches our strengths. Out of all the possible scenarios we could encounter, it is far more likely that we will encounter one that does not cater to our talents.

Evolutionary biologists use a term called “mismatch conditions” to describe when an organism is not well-suited for a condition it is facing. We have common phrases for mismatch conditions: “like a fish out of water” or “bring a knife to a gunfight.” Obviously, when you are in a mismatch condition, it is more difficult to succeed, to be useful, and to win. It is likely that life will not be optimal — mismatch conditions may exist. Maybe we did not grow up in the optimal culture for our interests, maybe we were exposed to the wrong subject or sport, maybe we were born at the wrong time in history. It is far more likely that we are living in a mismatch condition than in a well-matched one. Knowing this, we can take it upon ourselves to design our ideal lifestyle. We have to turn a mismatch condition into a well-matched one. Optimal lives are designed, not discovered.

Finally, returning to 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 us. It is simply entropy at work. It is nobody’s fault that life has problems. 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.

A closed system is one that is not taking in any energy from the outside. In other words, unless we add outside energy to keep things orderly, the natural trend of any closed system is to become more disordered. We will never be able to reverse entropy in the long run. Billions of years from now, every atom in the universe will be scattered and spread out such that entropy is maximized and nothing is orderly. But in the short run, we can create local pockets of order within our lives. The Second Law (of thermodynamics) defines 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.

Another related insight here as we conclude is that we should probably quit things faster than we do. There is always a risk that we will quit too early, but of all the possible things we could be exposed to and invested in, it is very unlikely that we are currently engaged in the best thing for us. Thus, if results are not coming easily, move on.

**Source Credits: 1) Journal: The Nature of the Physical World (1915). 2) The Second Law of Thermodynamics by Steven Pinker. 3) Galileo’s Finger by Peter Atkins.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa.