Entropy. The natural tendency for things to fall apart. This word has not left my brain since I first learned it in freshman year biology. My teacher explained it this way: no matter how many times you clean your room, how hard you try to keep your books organized, empty plastic water bottles in the trash, and clothes folded and put away neatly, somehow, some way, your room falls apart. Sound familiar? That funny word entropy has a way of seeping into our lives from every possible angle. The inevitable truth is things will fall apart.
For Christmas, I received a book on the relationship between everyday human life and the laws of physics.
The book planted a seed in my head, one that continued to grow the more I thought about the role entropy plays in our lives.
I am a perfectionist, and when things fall apart I can compare the feeling to that of the world coming to an end. The perfect plan I made for the weekend, the perfect grades I intended to get, the perfect life that I strived for, did not come together. As much as I try to achieve perfection, I can never reach it. Entropy made me realize that maybe perfection is unachievable, not due to personal inability to attain what you set out to accomplish, but because the very fundamentals of physics do not allow you to do so.
Humans can defy the law of gravity by building an antigravity chamber, or shooting themselves into space, but even then, the earth tugs just the tiniest bit on the masses that rotate around it. Essentially, there is no escaping gravity.
When I don’t do as well as I would have liked on a homework assignment or a test, I freak out, cry, and, after all that doesn’t work to calm me down, I turn to physics.
Society teaches us that order and organization are the only ways to accomplish a peaceful and satisfying existence. From lining up in a straight line in first grade, to creating entire towns based on a neat coordinate system. For the most part, this is necessary to keep complete disaster from happening.
This necessity does have its downfalls though because it becomes so ingrained into our very being, it begins to feel like order is a part of human nature. Entropy tells us that it isn’t. Things falling apart is fundamental to our existence. Why fight it?