![]() ![]() This is the second law of thermodynamics: It is a temporary condition in which certain things are hotter and more highly organised than the surrounding space. All energy has gone, and everything in the system is at the temperature of the surrounding space. ![]() Another example is life.Īs a general rule, everything in the universe tends towards entropy. One example of negentropy is a star system such as the Solar System. By 'order' is meant organisation, structure and function: the opposite of randomness or chaos. That's when I realized that my child had broken free of entropy and was now capable of making the world a better place.Negentropy is reverse entropy. I couldn't put my finger on the source of my joy until later in the day. I stayed frozen on my hands and knees watching Ayla create, feeling strangely triumphant. Those were the moments when I forgot all about entropy and was certain that the universe was hurtling towards equilibrium, not apocalypse. My peak experiences were always linked to creation: writing books, making art, building an organization, cleaning up a polluted river, and, of course, conceiving Ayla. Human life is defined by our ability to create. Sure I was eager for Ayla to learn to tidy up. But for me and my aching joints, the moment when Ayla put something together, rather than tearing it apart, was sheer bliss. Walking, talking, and sleeping through the night are probably the most anticipated milestones for parent and child. There are critical inflection points in your child’s life. In the bath that evening, she snapped the lid onto a container. Later that day, she fed baby Owen Cheerios-rather than dumping out the container of O’s onto the floor. You can imagine my surprise when I saw Ayla carefully piling two large blocks on top of each other, instead of knocking them down. Where was my cackling, bemused little mischief-maker, I wondered? What sort of devilish act of entropy had occurred now? ![]() I was in my usual cleaning posture-on my knees, hunched over, with rag in hand-when the house fell silent. Then, last week, the tide finally turned. I fantasized about days when Ayla might actually build something, or an even more potent hallucination, the moment when she’d learn to tidy up. As Ayla became mobile, I spent my days running after her, collecting upturned boxes of stuff and putting them back in place. I was a frazzled mess, the house had gone to the dogs and anything that Ayla got her hands on ended up smushed, tossed, dumped, splattered or otherwise destroyed. Entropy was a reason to have another drink, skip class or lay on the sofa all day-the universe and human beings were doomed anyway.Īfter giving birth to Ayla-pregnancy is one of the few examples of negative entropy in the universe-everything that came afterwards felt entropic. Unlike creative energy, entropy was about disorder, chaos and eventual death. ![]() I was now privy to one of the secrets of the universe and that put a bounce in my step for weeks.īut the concept also cast a gloomy shadow over my world. It was a Eureka moment for me-a light-bulb popped in my cranium and illuminated entropic transfers taking place all around me: bodies aging, cars burning up fuel, glaciers melting. Learning about entropy was a highlight of my brief career in science. It sounds pretty innocuous until you look at its implications on a macro level-many physicists speculate that the universe is gradually unraveling and is fated to something called “heat death.” Entropy explains that in closed systems, the amount of energy available to “do work” usually decreases. I learned about it in high school and then studied it more closely in university-level physics classes. Entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics, is a central principle in the study of science. ![]()
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