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.