The Ultimate Heat Death of the Universe, and You
(The first in a 4 part series on entropy and homeland security)
The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily as we go from past to future. On the other hand, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily as we go from past to future.
- Freeman Dyson
Or as Yeats observed: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Another expression of similar sentiment is Ben Franklin’s comment that “in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Intuitively we understand that systems tend to decay over time. People age and eventually die, and the maintenance of systems that humans build requires the constant input of resources, which must be extracted elsewhere. But why must this be so?
Nicholas Carnot, the founder of thermodynamics, observed that whenever work is done on a system some of the energy is lost, or dissipated, through processes like friction, conduction, raising the ambient temperature, and so on. Further, Carnot observed that closed systems tended toward greater, not lesser, randomness and disorder, or entropy. In other words, when work is done on a system, the system tends towards greater disorder, and called this the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or Entropy Law. Carnot postulated that eventually, over a long enough period of time, all the energy in the universe would be dissipated into uniformly distributed ambient heat, resulting in the “ultimate heat death of the universe” — a loathsome sounding fate, indeed.
While the loss of energy to dissipative processes does seem to be a universal property of systems, it’s also clear that many systems clearly organize and develop increasing complexity over time. Life is an excellent example of this. So this presents a real problem — how can the apparently irrefutable Entropy Law be reconciled with the equally irrefutable observation of highly complex, evolving systems in nature?
Ilya Prigogine, a physical chemist, re-constituted the entropy law to consider importations of matter and energy from external sources, and showed that with the importation of increasing amounts of matter and energy, systems can self-organize into more complex structures, which must dissipate increasing amounts of energy — thus the name dissipative systems. The apparent contradiction between the Entropy Law and the obvious complexity of the universe has been reconciled. For this reason, Prigogine’s version of the Entropy Law is a foundational concept for many of the theoretical frameworks that we use to understand the complexity that we see in nature, such as General Systems Theory, Living Systems Theory, Social Entropy, Theory, and others.
So all is well; order has been restored to the universe, right? Not so fast.
Prigogine’s reformulation of the Entropy Law still holds that entropy increases as a result of all physical processes. So while importations of matter and energy can facilitate the development, growth, and maintenance of increasingly complex and wonderful systems, including cats, puppies, and cute children, this occurs at the expense of greater disorder elsewhere.
In ecological terms, the world is driven by energy from the sun. Organisms compete for energy, space and other things, but using continual sunlight, the system renews itself, with the buildup of entropy occurring in the sun as it slowly burns itself out. Even so, organisms undergo decay and die, or can be eaten to sustain another organism. So while overall system order is maintained, death, or entropy, is still a certainty.
What about human systems — the social, governmental, economic, infrastructure, and other systems that the ever growing human population needs to survive? Aside from inevitable death, here’s why entropy matters to you: The growing scale and complexity of human systems requires ever increasing inputs of matter, energy, and information. The earth is essentially a closed system with sunlight and occasional space debris entering. The Entropy Law means that the implications of the extraction and use of these inputs should be manifesting themselves as disorder in human systems and the environment, and they are.
Economically, globalization is a strong self-organizing dynamic, but the perception is benefits of globalization are accruing mainly to a relatively small number of countries, and within those countries, to relatively small segments of the populations.
Globalization and economic disparity is motivating human mass migration that is resulting in anxiety and alienation in many Western countries, which is manifesting itself as social unrest, and even terrorism.
As financial, economic, and infrastructure systems are become more integrated and optimized, then breakdowns can spread faster with larger consequence.
Pollution and other environmental degradation are reducing the habitability of the earth, while potentially driving climate change, which, if it materializes, will feed back and exacerbate the other problems mentioned above.
It appears that entropy has come home to roost, and governmental action to try to solve these problems will require, you guess it, more taxes.
Other stories in this series:
Globalization, Entropy, and Terrorism
Sand piles, Avalanches, and the Next Catastrophe
Globalization and the Coming Social Crisis
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