Life & The Second Law of Thermodynamics
You watch keenly, the delicate steps of an older woman as she goes down the stairs. A nervous smile envelopes her face as the murmurings of younger and sprightly persons behind her increase. One foot goes up, a pause, and another follows. A grimace of pain then a deep sigh. Muscles tense and relax. Muscles once green are now browned by the oxidation of life.
In a closed system, entropy increases with time.
Entropy: disorderliness, decay, deterioration.
Things disintegrate with time: memories fade, bodies deteriorate, love flickers, attention wanes, and even the mind decomposes.
The second law of thermodynamics explains that entropy, which is a measure of the degree of disorderliness of a system, increases with time. it is a measure of phase changes i.e. how disorderly is the final state from the initial state?
As we get older, the rate at which our lives can easily fall apart increases. Things don't get better with time. Time is a beast and the fate of anything subject to time is disintegration. Disorderliness.
As you grow older, you begin to understand that you need more energy, more effort to get your life together, and even greater effort and energy to keep it together. And so, you design a plan for your life to save yourself from chaos, which is the fate of all things. You develop habits, create routines, and imbibe a certain kind of rigor that integrates your life together.
Another realization is that you get less lucky as time increases. The cosmic randomness that aligns events with time seems to decrease exponentially as disorderliness increases. Imagine several billiard balls on a board. Let's start with three thrown randomly on the board and allowed to move around. The chance that Ball A will hit Ball B is one out of three. Now imagine when we put in a thousand balls, what are the odds that Ball A will hit Ball B? It's not 1 out of 1000 trials. It's 1 out of a billion trials. Exponential increase.
Knowing that your life actually falls apart as you get older introduces a new realization: you'd have to work harder to keep your life together as you age. And it is more probable for something to stop working than it is for it to keep working. At a certain age, it is more probable that you have a heart attack than it is to not have one. more probable to have a prostate crisis than it is not to have one. In old age, you wake up and wonder which part of your body decided to stop working while you were asleep.
Max Planck mentioned that “nature prefers the more probable states to the less probable because in nature processes take place in the direction of greater probability. Heat goes from a body at a higher temperature to a body at a lower temperature because the state of equal temperature distribution is more probable than a state of unequal temperature distribution.”
It is more probable that something hot will become cold on its own than it is for something cold to become hot on its own.
To extrapolate, it is more probable that you will snooze your alarm and sleep more other than wake to have a run. Deciding to have more vegetables than carbohydrates is an anomaly because, by the nature of your body, it is excited by more sugar and not veggies. It is more probable that you would have skipped this post than it is that you are reading it. Nature abhors resistance. A moving water will take the path of less resistance.
It is easier to trouble a calm water than it is to calm a troubled water. To build is difficult, to destroy is easy.
You can’t move against entropy, but as Dylan Thomas encourages
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Anarchy and chaos are the more probable state of nature and everything tends towards it. Including your life.