Hello! What follows – to be put on here gradually over the next couple of weeks – are some scattered thoughts about entropy, consciousness, religion and philosophy. None of it is really original to me – a lot of this is pretty much book notes cribbed from various sources, popular books written across various disciplines. It’s pretty crass, in two senses. First of all, I use a couple of rude words here and there, which I hope you’ll excuse, but I’m just trying to get the ideas across as idiomatically as possible. And second, the science – and the religion, too – is pretty basic and non-technical and, I’m sure, full of errors and inconsistencies. What’s written here is really just a first draft, or more precisely, an attempt to get some scattered thoughts in order.
I’ll print the thoughts here 5 sections at a time. So stay tuned for further posts. I will likely edit it as I go along, too. I welcome your comments and observations. Thanks!! Your compatriot in the search for meaning, – Bob
- Life is hard, and consciousness is hard. Cats are probably right to be so pissed off all the time.
2. The universe, as you know, is made up of vast areas of nothingness, and a few scattered lumpy bits.
The universe is interesting in the places where it is a bit lumpy. Amidst the vast, unvariegated, endless realm of space, there are supernovas, planets, asteroids, human beings and broccoli. All of this “stuff” involves atoms clumped together more than they typically are in empty space.
The thing is, space tends to get even more non-lumpy over time, so human beings and broccoli are batting against the curve, so to speak. Or to put it a little more scientifically: the fact that there are these lumpy bits of matter is challenged by the second law thermodynamics, otherwise known as entropy.
The law of entropy basically says, to put it crassly, “left to its own devices, time turns everything to shit.” Given enough time, the lumpy, clumpy bits of matter are broken down, Sometimes people refer to entropy as “tending towards disorder” because a piece of broccoli, with its ridges and curves, feels more ordered than the green, broccoli-flavored soup that broccoli would become when it was liquified. And all of us lumpy bits, over time, tend towards the soup. Supernovas, planets, asteroids, human beings and broccoli are all statistically headed towards that vast, unvariegated, endless realm of space, our atoms spread out wider than they are in our beautiful bodies. We all tend towards the perfect distribution of matter and energy.
3. Time’s arrow is important to entropy. It’s not the other way around – vast, endless space is not tending towards gathering its atoms together to form broccoli. Time is messing with all these beautifully lumpy forms and smoothing them out, making all the atoms evenly distributed. Time doesn’t do this right away (you can keep your lunch plans). We’re talking about tendencies and averages here. Given enough time, the universe gets more and more regular, atoms perfectly spaced out. WE are gradually heading towards an equidistant distribution of matter – which, from our point of view, is quite boring.
Of course, “shit” and “boring” are subjective terms from the human perspective. Indeed, another word for unvariegated space, other than “shit”, might be “perfection”. Systems tend towards a perfect distribution of matter. But what this “perfection” means, when it comes to the distribution of atoms, is a few particles floating about here and there, not clumping together. If a house party were perfectly distributed, every guest would be six feet away from the nearest guest in every direction – no guests sitting next to each other, no one closer to each other than anyone else, like the dots on square dots graph paper. Which might be kinda fun for our antisocial friends who hate house parties, come to think of it – but let’s not get distracted. In the wide-open universe, if all the relatively few atoms that are out there were perfectly distributed, there are very few atoms relative to the amount of space that’s out there. So a perfect distribution ends up being a few random swirling atoms, far apart from each other.
4. “Clumping together” is how matter happens, how stuff appears in the universe. There are – fortunately for us – forces of attraction that allow this to happen, like gravity and electromagnetism. These forces help to complicate the natural flow of entropy, which, left to its own devices, would turn everything to an un-lumpy, perfectly distributed nothingness.
5. Given enough time, entropy will eventually “win” over the forces of attraction. You’d best cancel your lunch plans sixty billion years from now; they ain’t happening.
Gravity, electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force may appear to us as being really, really strong. They can hold stuff together for an impressive amount of time. But forces are dependent on various factors like distance and mass. Entropy is a physical law: it just keeps on happening, all the time. You could say entropy waits inexorably for the moment when the laws of attraction trip up, and then, poof, things tend slightly again towards a diffuse tapioca. Attractive forces can hold things together for millennia, but they just need to make one “mistake” and entropy will swoop in, and turn everything towards the evenly distributed perfection, that vast boringness that awaits all.
Again, entropy doesn’t do this all at once, but haltingly, bit by bit over vast amounts of time. Regions of space usually take a long while to go from lumpy, diverse somethings to the almost-nothing of tapioca, diffuse perfection. Lumps bump into other lumps, new forms get made. A planet falls out of one orbit and then, a few million years later, gets pulled into a red supergiant. A whole lot can happen in constrained space. Here on earth, which is always constrained by gravity and other forces, there will be a whole lot happening for a long time. But gradually, inexorably, over time and all the time, the universe tends towards a vast nothingness. Good luck, player one.
Rev. Bob Janis 