Entropy wins in the end; It’s what we do in the meantime that matters

I’m cur­rent­ly read­ing a non­fic­tion book about physics (and life) writ­ten by one of my favorite sci­ence authors. 

It’s a favorite of mine that I’m re-read­ing for the sec­ond time. The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll is a sweep­ing nar­ra­tive of our cur­rent knowl­edge of physics and its impli­ca­tions for humanity. 

Carroll writes with such lucid­i­ty and sim­plic­i­ty that even such eso­teric con­cepts as Higgs bosons and entropy are per­fect­ly under­stand­able. But where the author real­ly shines is when he reflects upon what we know and applies it to the lev­el of human­i­ty. He intro­duces an idea he calls poet­ic nat­u­ral­ism, which he describes as a way of look­ing at the world around us with sto­ries that apply to the var­i­ous lev­els of exam­i­na­tion, from the tini­est par­ti­cles to the cos­mos as a whole. 

For exam­ple, one sto­ry we tell about mat­ter is that it is almost all emp­ty space at the lev­el of ele­men­tary par­ti­cles. Think of a pea being sur­round­ed by a swarm of sand par­ti­cles hun­dreds of kilo­me­ters away—that’s what an atom looks like up close, and noth­ing can enter that space. So the sto­ry of mat­ter at its most fun­da­men­tal lev­el is that it’s almost entire­ly emp­ty space. 

But at the human lev­el, does it make sense to speak of mat­ter as emp­ty? If I stub my toe on a rock, does it feel like emp­ty space? Of course not, so we use dif­fer­ent sto­ries to describe the world we inter­act with every day. 

Here’s the key ques­tion: Which sto­ry is “true?” Carroll says it depends on which ques­tions you want answered. On what he calls your domain of applicability. 

Okay, what does all this have to do with an old pho­to of a rusty truck and a dilap­i­dat­ed house? I’m get­ting to that. 

Chuck Witt sent me this pho­to, which he cap­tured many years ago. Chuck writes,

“Mother nature takes a toll on every­thing. Taken on one of my coun­ty­wide pho­to jaunts. This pho­to was tak­en so many years ago that nature has prob­a­bly com­plete­ly over­tak­en both the house and the vehicle.”

As I perused the pho­to, I was think­ing about the sec­tion of Sean Carroll’s book I was cur­rent­ly read­ing, about entropy. A great­ly sim­pli­fied def­i­n­i­tion of entropy is the ten­den­cy of mat­ter and ener­gy to go from an ordered to a dis­or­dered state as time passes. 

Stars expend their ener­gy and burn out. Old hous­es rot and col­lapse. Cars rust away. Species go extinct. 

Think about that. In all like­li­hood, one day humans will be extinct. Within the blink of an eye (in cos­mic time), every­thing we have built will rot, rust, and decay away. Some day there will be no trace left of the late great species Homo Sapiens. Eventually, the same will hap­pen to our star and our planet. 

I’m not try­ing to be a down­er today—I’m just express­ing the nat­u­ral­is­tic view of real­i­ty. Religious views may dif­fer, but as far as what we know from sci­ence, this is our future. 

So what are we to make of this infor­ma­tion? To me, it’s not all gloom and doom. Our sto­ry, in the par­a­digm of poet­ic nat­u­ral­ism, is that we have one life to live and chances are good that every­one we know today will live and die in sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances. In oth­er words, the world is not com­ing to an end tomor­row or the day after. 

We have one shot at doing some­thing mean­ing­ful while we’re on this big old rock. We each get to choose for our­selves what “some­thing mean­ing­ful” is. One of my favorite poems is “To Laugh Often And Much” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’ll leave you on this hap­pi­er note. 

To laugh often and much;

to win the respect of the intel­li­gent peo­ple

and the affec­tion of chil­dren;

to earn the appre­ci­a­tion of hon­est crit­ics

and endure the betray­al of false friends;

to appre­ci­ate beau­ty;

to find the best in oth­ers; 

to leave the world a bit bet­ter

whether by a healthy child,
a gar­den patch,
or a redeemed social con­di­tion;

to know that one life has breathed eas­i­er 

because you lived here.

This is to have succeeded.