Life, Death, and Entropy (FINAL PROJECT)

A child plays by the sea. He creates a castle in the sand; it takes him all day to construct. Too proud of his work to risk playing with it, for fear of wrecking the delicate structure, he stands and admires his work. In the evening light, the tide is returning. The waves lap closer and closer. Not wanting the sea to claim his hard work, the boy bravely defends his castle. As the water breaks down a wall he rushes to reconstruct it before the next wave comes. Eventually though, the water wins and the tide rushes over the castle until the sand returns to the smooth surface of the beach.  

This, to me, was the clearest way to explain entropy. There are many ways to explain it. And most often entropy is described in connection to thermodynamics and science. However, the concept of entropy is much more all-encompassing. The laws of thermodynamics can explain much more about our world than the simple science of heat. In fact, they explain life, and order. The laws provide a glimpse as to what drives us as well as what holds us back. It explains what we are inevitably headed for: complete and utter chaos. As Gleick put it in his book The Information, “The universe is running down. It is a degenerative one-way street. The final state of maximum entropy is our destiny” (Gleick, pg. 271). In this way we are provided with a destination. 

With a destination, there becomes movement: time. “Time only moves forward because a property of the universe called "entropy," roughly defined as the level of disorder, only ever increases, and so one cannot reverse a rise in entropy after it has occurred” (Live Science).

Time is meaningless. Life is hollow. Our entire existence is empty. This would all be true if it were not for death, for entropy. However, as colors standout from a grey background, life is made real with the addition of death. Life would be nothing without death, because death brings an end, a time when we must have fulfilled what we want to in life. We create order out of disorder and do our best to maintain that order. So as to have life, order, etc. we must have a counter balance- disorder, death.  Life becomes more meaningful when we only have so much time to live it. It provides motivation to accomplish tasks, a greater drive to create order and make use of it.

In life, we create order; we build, we explore, we learn, we teach. Then we die. It is natural for us as humans to try to push entropy away, to try to slow it down. We act like the boy defending his castle, his masterpiece.“On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place, but to forestall burial” (Dillard, pg. 123).

We learn ways to keep our body healthy for longer as we age, so that we can fend off the feeling of old age. We use anti-aging cream on our bodies to hide the disorder our bodies are slowly falling into. We expand our knowledge, and organize our lives with 5 year plans and goals to accomplish. We do these things as if it will hide us from death, as if we could become an exception to chaos. Yet, “The dead outnumber the living […] The dead will always outnumber the living” (Dillard, pg. 49). People are dying and that is not a new trend. We have heightened the life expectancy, fending off death for just that much longer.

Indeed these acts are not in vain. A lack in creating order will simply speed up the suffocation of the existing order by entropy. Annie Dillard says, “If you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not” (Dillard, pg. 122). A literal example of this is the dusting and cleaning we do; our toilets, garbages, drains, brooms, mops, etc. Without these we would literally be buried alive. Instead we cheat the Earth’s carrying capacity by organizing our waste, our food and our lives. But no matter what measures we take; the dead outnumber the living, and entropy is still increasing.

Yet, again, what is life without death. What is the significance of order, if it is not contrasted by disorder? Energy is only important because there is entropy. Life is short, and the shorter it is; the more we are aware of the significance of it. In the play Arcadia, Thomasina’s life is far more precious because she had a shorter life. This does not mean it was good that she died the eve of her 17^th birthday. But what significance and impact on the people around her was dearer   because each moment of her life was important and remembered. As we get older and add on to our experiences and knowledge, we lose memories and moments. You naturally hold on to important memories and knowledge- but there is a decision as to what is deemed important. Those other ‘unimportant’ memories are lost, perhaps forever. That is entropy at work.Eventually entropy will consume everything. Nothing will be hot, just room temperature. There is no way to reverse this process. “You cannot stir things apart” (Stoppard. pg. 9).

There is a silver lining to this building cloud of doom though; it is simply that we must use what we have. The boy must not be too proud to use his castle while he has it. It will disappear, no matter what he does. He cannot hold back the tide just as we cannot escape entropy. The boy must give his castle meaning. For it is only in the knowledge of our limitations that we can be truly free.

FOLLOW THE STARS

IN THE GOLDFISH BOWL

AN END.

(Barbery, chpt.2)

 




 

WORKS CITED:

Barbery, Muriel, and Alison Anderson. The Elegance of the Hedgehog. New York: Europa Editions, 2008. Print.

Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Knopf, 1999. Print.

Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon, 2011. Print.

Nørretranders, Tor. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness down to Size. New York: Viking, 1998. Print.

Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. Print.

Here is the visual from Jerrod's presentation.

The Goldfish Bowl (November 25, 2013)

 "Follow the Stars

in the goldfish bowl

   and end."

"Apparently, now and again adults take the time to sit down and contemplate what a disaster their life is. They complain without understanding, and, like flies constantly banging against the same old windowpane, they buzz around, suffer, waste away, get depressed then wonder how they got caught up in this spiral that is taking them where they don't want to go. The most intelligent among them turn it into a religion: oh, the despicable vacuousness of bourgeois existence! Cynics of this kind frequently dine at Papa's table: "What has become of the dreams of our youth?" they ask, with their smug, disillusioned air. "Those years are long gone, and life's a bitch." I despise this false lucidity that comes with age. The truth is that they are just like everyone else: kids who don't understand what has happened to them and who act big and tough when in fact all they want is to burst into tears.

And yet there's nothing to understand. The problem is that children believe what adults say and, once they're adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. "Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is" is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late. The mystery remains intact, but all the available energy has long ago been wasted on stupid things. All that's left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can't find any meaning in your life, and then, the better to convince yourself, you deceive your own children.

All our family acquaintances have followed the same path: their youth spent trying to make the most of their intelligence, squeezing their studies like a lemon to make sure they'd secure a spot among the elite, then their entire lives wondering with a flabbergasted look on their faces why all that hopefulness has led to such a vain existence. People aim for the stars and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd. That might deprive you of a few good moments in your childhood but it would save you a considerable amount of time as an adult — not to mention the fact that you'd be spared at least one traumatic experience, i.e. the goldfish bowl."

An excerpt from the book Elegance of the Hedgehog. Thoughts?? 
I found a page with the whole chapter, if you want to read more go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98331242 

Costumes from Class (October 31, 2013)

Well, here are the pictures from class on Halloween. For those who weren't present, you missed out on some great costumes! Hope everyone had a fun Halloween. 

The Death Toll (October 30, 2013)

I found some random, and kind of interesting, websites that track the amount of deaths and other random stats. Thought I would share them, so check them out.....

This website has a death count, a birth count, and some random other real time world statistics:

http://www.worldometers.info/

This one shows you how many people have died since you opened the website. The deaths are also sorted into different causes of death (heart disease/accidents/etc):

http://www.fabulant.com/downloadcenter/deathcounter/deathcounter.html

Questions about The Magus (October 24, 2013)

Here are a couple of questions that I thought about while reading the Magus....
1. Can freedom be obtained? Or is death the only form of freedom?
2. Are you living the water or the wave? How about Conchis and Nicholas? (taken from De Deukans, don't                       remember the exact place in the book).
3. Is Nicolas a seeker of mystery or does he run blindly into it?
4. What is the purpose of the fictional stories and "shows" that Conchis uses on Nicholas, when  he is so adamant that novels are useless because of their fictional content?
5. Does it matter whether or not Conchis' stories were true or not?

More on the Magus...(October 22, 2013)

Last week the end of our discussion was on how Nicolas goes from the 'boring' or mundane existence, to the strange adventure and back to the boring. (I should have written this blog when the ideas were still fresh in my head but I forgot so I will try to put together some sort of thought process). This got me to thinking about life in general and how life is kind of like that adventure- with twists and turns and struggles- until we finally die and exist (as some believe) in a sort of bland and uninteresting way. I am not sure if that makes sense, and I still have to work on it a bit, but I thought it was kind of a weird thing to think about.
This also ties into the discussion of entropy that we had earlier this month.