Entropy in every breath!

As the day winds down, sipping cognac, I take stock of the day shutting down. Did things settle down today or did they just get bigger, one leading to another, never really settling. Typically, you keep a to-do list handy to track and close the endless items but haven’t you noticed that it never ever clears up. Eventually, you lose interest and dump the laundry list. This disenchantment has led me to a visceral suspicion of something more fundamental at play here. So why is there always something to fix or clean up? Why cannot perpetual ‘order’ ever be achieved setting us free?

Interestingly, in physics, they got a funny definition and rule for this apparent ‘lack of order’ or shall we say, gradual decline into disorder. Entropy! Technically, it is a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work (Phew!). Simply put, it represents the degree of order or randomness in a system. They even conjured up a law for it. The famed second law of thermodynamics that states in a closed and changing system disorder just continues to increases with time.

Till yesterday, I did not have an issue with this concept because it was supposed to be applicable to ‘closed-looped systems’ only. Little did I know, the implication of this law was much more profound and universal. It affects every damn single being or thing at every single instance of existence. And unaware of its universality, we (dolts) rant and rave to no relief. Look around. Every day you scream at your kids or spouse…where is my pen?! Haven’t I told you to put it back once you are done!!..or only last week, I cleaned my desk and now!...all too familiar scenes. Well sometimes, even as you scream, a guilt emerges (deep inside you) amidst the echo of similar screams of your parents, ages ago. Look around your house or office table to realize how difficult it is to keep things in order. You wonder, why is such a simple principle violated so often. A simple discipline that simply cannot be kept. Nobody is proposing to clear the math Olympiads but just ‘restore the status-quo’ once you have done using it.

Let’s be honest. It is not that we have not tried but truth is, it never worked. Why? Because it is so pervasive. Take a simple example. You decide to be orderly one fine Sunday morning. Read the newspaper, fold it back nicely and place it back to where you took it. You then spend the whole weekend cleaning and re-arranging, swearing to be orderly. You even make checklists and resolutions to just maintain what you have achieved.  Yet, in a week’s time, the vagaries of nature have sneaked in and once again turned the shelves and bathrooms upside down. What depresses you more is the banality of the task you wanted to achieve. It is not even a fraction of the effort or focus needed to achieve a 6-pack abs. The very ordinariness of the silly challenge you set for yourself finally kills your self-belief and self-esteem. Is it because we are undisciplined by nature or is it something more fundamental?

Well, it turns out that, any dynamic systems (and that includes us) will disintegrate into disorder with time. There are two levels to this nonsense.

In intelligent systems, or eco-systems involving intelligence entities (say humans) , the reality is that, unless you are super vigilant to every instance in every action and its purpose, you miss it. Like watching your breath during meditation. You cannot possibly live like a stack always unwinding to restore before you go about your next action. Theoretically you can but practically never. The reason is that after an action ‘happens’, the result changes the initial condition in two possible ways. If you got the intended result, you are likely to quickly move on to the next (to save time), this is an natural optimization technique (acquired by evolution). If it was not the intended result, it gets worse. Now  you are more disturbed with the failure  that the chances to restore the initial condition will be lesser. In short, there is no reward or logic to rewind and we typically end up running low priority weekend threads or daemons to clean up or restore. Even meditation is one such thread to unwind a tensed mind. Because in the immediacy of ‘living’ and interacting with several other dynamic systems, it is virtually impossible to restore orderliness or constancy. Come to think of it, this dynamic interactions and ensuing reactions resemble Brownian Motion!

The same entropy applies to buying and possessing things. Every new asset only adds to entropy. Like the wise Admiral who realized ‘half of world problems would end if only we knew how little we need’ . You cook up excuses to possess new devices but do not realize the liability they become once novelty wears out (a storage problem, a maintenance problem, a disposal problem). Suddenly you have become this ‘maintainer machine’ to fix and maintain all your possessions. Look around, every weekend, there is tap to fix, a bulb to change, utensils to replace…the list goes on. Your smart phones needs constant care, the apps need constant upgrade, sync contacts and data across all other gadgets…the entropy just increases with every new device. The below equation proves that entropy increases with the number of objects or tasks at our disposal. There is no point fighting entropy. The only way is to reduce the number of objects or tasks associated with you.

With unintelligent systems it is equally bad. In fact, the second law that stated entropy shall increase, posed a serious paradox to physicists of late 19^th century. Unlike chemical reactions, the fundamental laws of physics are by nature completely reversible. So if entropy can increase, it must be able to decrease as well but the reality is not. It was Ludwig Boltzwmann who finally figured it out. He said, it is not a ‘law’ as in Newton’s law of gravity but more of statistical law that merely suggests ‘by probability, entropy will not decrease’. The genius lay in the insight that the ‘law’ - entropy will (probably) only increase – could be easily understood with the aid of theory of probability. Consider this, will a tub with a drop of ink only spread out or will it ever clear up and produce back the small drop of ink? Truth is,(being a probability,) though  it is very unlikely, but certainly not impossible. In fact, Boltzmann identified the inadequacy of his own theory further. Technically, by the equation, entropy can be shown to increase into the past and future. But let’s not go any further. Our objective is not to drown ourselves in esoteric Physics.

So there you are. There is no point in shouting at others. We are forced to accept that systems (intelligent or otherwise) will continue to deteriorate and the only respite, perhaps, is a sincere accommodation of Mr. Entropy. On a lighter note, being fundamentally a probability, this also leads us to a seeming impossible possibility; that of getting up one fine Sunday morning and seeing one’s desk spick and span! As Mr. Holmes once quipped, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth’. It must be Entropy after all!