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random thoughts on entropy

June 5, 2020 by Settayah No Comments
While waiting for our dinner to cook itself, I am contemplating several existential questions, struggling to understand why the clean gets dirty with ease but the dirty won’t change without resistance. Why everything beautiful takes years of effort, whereas the ugly flourishes even when left unattended. Why can’t I eat just one muffin and stop instead of gobbling them all up…


It’s already been 10 years since we had our first garden (currently taking care of a third one in a third country) and I have always wondered whether there’s any scientific reason for weeds to be so resilient and invasive, unlike the gentle flowers, which never intrude like that. If only roses and tulips were as aggressive as weeds, what a fragrant and colourful place our Earth would be.

If we plant a weed amidst roses, it won’t be long before it chokes the whole garden, but if we plant a rose in a field of weeds, we won’t be getting a rosarium anytime soon. What I perceive as nobility is obviously unnatural and fragile and if not properly nurtured and protected, natural chaos will engulf it. The bottom line is, I’ve learned that if I want a divine garden, I should not leave a single sprout of weed.

It’s already clear that dinner won’t self-create so I am taking my scientific quest even further:

  • Why would a drop of ink in water spoil it all but a drop of water in a cup of ink won’t dilute it?
  • Why can’t a wise man change a village of fools but a single fool could destroy a whole village of wisemen?
A while ago I was discussing these questions with friends and they told me the answer I was looking for was “entropy”. The word meant nothing to me at the time, so I did my research. Having a brain strongly inclined to use its creative half, it took me hours of concentrated attention to even grasp the concept but finally I was able to understand what it means: each thermodynamic system leans towards “disorder”, i.e. something that is unpredictable.

Here is the history of the term “entropy”, according to Wikipedia:

This 'molecular ordering' entropy perspective traces its origins to molecular movement interpretations developed by Rudolf Clausius in the 1850s, particularly with his 1862 visual conception of molecular disgregation. Similarly, in 1859, after reading a paper on the diffusion of molecules by Clausius, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell formulated the Maxwell distribution of molecular velocities, which gave the proportion of molecules having a certain velocity in a specific range. This was the first-ever statistical law in physics.

In 1864, Ludwig Boltzmann, a young student in Vienna, came across Maxwell’s paper and was so inspired by it that he spent much of his long and distinguished life developing the subject further. Later, Boltzmann, in efforts to develop a kinetic theory for the behaviour of a gas, applied the laws of probability to Maxwell's and Clausius' molecular interpretation of entropy so as to begin to interpret entropy in terms of order and disorder. Similarly, in 1882 Hermann von Helmholtz used the word 'Unordnung' (disorder) to describe entropy.

  

This whole theory, however, is based on the presumption that the Universe is a chaotic system which it might be not, so as long as the official science keeps piling theories over presumptions, I will keep looking for my answers. Or I will just live with what I’ve learnt: Mother Nature favours that which is the strongest and the fittest and not necessarily the most spiritual. And if it is the spirit that helped us evolve from animals to humans, then we have an eternal obligation to protect it from the invasion of pests and weeds.

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