Admittedly, there have been very few times in my life when I’ve found myself genuinely intrigued by a scientific phenomenon, much less been provoked enough to write an entire article on one. That was, until I discovered entropy. Now I spend most of my time trying to forget about it, if only for the sake of a full night’s sleep. So, allow me to share the crippling weight of this existential crisis with you: what exactly is entropy, how does it doom us to an inevitable state of nothingness, and why do we insist on purpose if the laws of physics are hell-bent on proving it doesn’t exist?
If you’re anything like me and gave up on physics entirely after O-levels, entropy might sound like an unfamiliar concept. To put it simply, the second law of thermodynamics states that an isolated system, like our universe, which contains the same total amount of matter and energy as it did during the Big Bang, tends to move toward an inevitable state of ‘disorder’, the measure of this disorder being entropy (derived from the Greek word entropia: transformation). In this sense, disorder implies the total possible ways in which particles in a system can be arranged. Still with me? Imagine two bedrooms: one with clothing neatly folded and stacked away in locked cupboards, and another with all of it strewn across the floor randomly. We can say that there is a greater total number of possible combinations for clothes to be arranged in the latter in comparison to the former; the second room has higher entropy than the first.
Since there exist overwhelmingly greater ways for particles to be arranged in disordered states as opposed to ordered ones, systems move towards higher entropy simply on the basis of probability. Look at it this way: if we drop a bunch of gas particles into a container, there’s only one scenario in which they would be arranged in perfect order (low entropy), but billions of ways for them to spread themselves out (high entropy).
I promise this gets interesting.
The problem here is that as energy becomes more chaotic, it becomes less usable. When a system evolves towards maximum entropy, energy becomes uniformly distributed, or in other words, we reach a state of absolute equilibrium. Essentially, the energy difference needed for thermodynamic processes to be carried out vanishes, and over time, stars burn out and matter decays. The universe reaches a state called “heat death”; thermal energy has been so evenly spread that it can’t be harnessed to do any sort of work. The drip stops, and things go still.
To put it even simpler, everything is dying. Constantly. And there’s virtually nothing we can do about it. However, even if the literal battle between life and entropy ends in the eventual heat death of the cosmos (fun), the fight itself poses us with intense philosophical questions.
As intelligent beings possessing a form of consciousness that allows us to contemplate our own existence, humans seek to justify themselves, to validate the fact that they exist for a reason: that their decisions matter. As a direct result of the curse that is being sentient, the fear of dying has plagued us for about as long as our desire to live meaningfully has. We have always been uniquely, painfully aware of our impermanence, and it isn’t even just us: every conceivable aspect of the existence of quite literally anything is temporary. So, why does some innate, indescribable force within us constantly grasp at nothing in the hope of finding something? The most glaring question here, then, is how consciousness and purpose could ever possibly coexist with an entropic universe, one that ultimately descends into radio silence and fades into oblivion? Like all animals, human beings feel the biological need to survive and elongate their lifespans, but why do we dream of purpose beyond it? If celestial bodies like stars (entire galaxies of them), that are so much greater than we could ever fathom being, are doomed to non-existence, who are we to believe our lives have meaning? Why do we desire to give our insignificance a direction? The trajectory of the universe may be moving towards a state of nothingness, but if so, why is it that human beings feel such a strong need for something to give us value, even in the face of decay so absolute that it renders all our thoughts, emotions, and actions utterly meaningless? If nothing matters, why do we care so much?
Now, there are two distinct ways in which we can answer these questions. The first being ‘giving in’ to our purposeless, insignificant existence and accepting entropy for the decisive fate that it is. However, it is notable that even after having conceded to this, a great majority of us will still choose to be, which brings me to my second, and what I personally find to be more convincing, argument.
Individual beings exist in open systems, meaning that we exchange matter and energy with our external environment. We change, adapt, evolve, and thrive. Although our eventual death is an inevitability, we continue to exist throughout our lifespans on the principle of self-preservation, the subconscious drive to protect oneself from harm. However, beneath this biological hardwiring is something much deeper that Arthur Schopenhauer describes as ‘the will to live’, or “blind incessant impulse without knowledge”. He argues that, purely based on observation, there exists a fundamental and irrational force beyond all reason that causes us to desire endlessly. Human beings (for better or for worse) can never be content, and our lives are characterised by endless longing. If this is so, which it is, then our existence defies the all-encompassing, all-damning notion of entropy.
Nothing lasts, efforts fade, life ends.
Yet, the nature of our being refuses to give in. Funnily enough, it simply doesn’t matter to us what the trajectory of the universe has to say about our fate. If on a cosmic scale we are all doomed to be reduced to nothing, our ability to find purpose in quite literally anything, to want and want and want knowing the outcome, makes us a contradiction in the fabric of spacetime. The power we possess to desire, an incomprehensibly minuscule force that pulls the universe ever so slightly in a direction opposite to where it’s headed, continues to exist regardless of how tiny.
Living things resist decay, knowing there is no way around it, and although entropy may win in the end, our will to live transcends that outcome. Another way of seeing the living struggle against entropy is viewing reality as (as Whitehead would put it), the process of becoming; we live through occasions of experience, and their temporality is exactly what gives them meaning. That is to say, the journey holds precedence over the destination. Whereas entropy implies complete stillness and an end to becoming, our lives are full of constant unfolding and novelty. Therefore, moving towards higher entropy does not diminish the importance of everything that came before it; instead, we may even dare to think of it as more valuable. Our existence, however fleeting, can never possibly be replicated.
?Another approach could be Camus’s interpretation of Sisyphus. If Sisyphus’ boulder is the burden of an unavoidable fate, or in this sense, entropy, why does he continue to push it? Why must we imagine him as happy? In essence, this is because the insignificance of his decisions frees him. When we are bound to eventual doom, we are free in choosing to be happy and content in a futile fight against it, to make our struggle the meaning we seek so desperately. As Vaclav Havel said, “If entropy is the law of the universe, the struggle against entropy is the law of life.
-Anam Rahim Khan