When your Universal Rent is Due
And your Landlord is on your case
One of the laws often cited as opposing evolution is the second law of thermodynamics.
The law states thus:
Nature evolves from orderliness to disorderliness.
Left in a room, ice is bound to melt and evaporate into water vapour. Ice is more ordered than water vapour. Given time, disorderliness emerges.
Another way of stating the second law of thermodynamics is:
There is more water vapour than ice cubes.
When you ask the waiter to serve you your preferred drink on the rocks, the rocks eventually melt. And somehow, you will feel like your bucket of ice is getting smaller. You then order more ice cubes, but in the long run, what you get served is disorder.
Therefore, over time, in any universe, there should be more disorderliness than orderliness.
This contrasts with your and my existence, which are orderly states.
A proper understanding of the same law is necessary to understand why this is the case.
Closed Systems
Thermodynamics was developed by scientists who believed in closed systems.
Consider a box with particles of sprayed perfume in one corner. Such a state is orderly in the sense that the perfume particles are located on one side or corner of the box.
Over time, the particles spread over the space the box offers, progressing from a state of orderliness (easy location of perfume particles) to disorderliness (spread-out particles).
This is a simplified way of understanding the arrow of time.
It is easy to know that a cup was intact before it fell and broke into several pieces. It is one way of saying: ordered states tend to exist in the past and not in the future.
This was all okay except for one thing — closed systems.
The problem is, there are hardly any closed systems.
Open Systems
Analysis of details in these examples reveal there to be no closed systems, only open ones.
That box needs an input of energy for the particles to spread from a corner to other parts of the box.
You, as a system, need energy in the form of food to chemically process and convert it into useful force, so that you can read what I typed here days or maybe years ago (I don’t know when you will read this post but we are grateful that you are here :) ).
Now, if the systems are open, then everything surrounding it is the system’s universe.
This universe becomes the place for dumping all the waste the organism produces. It does this with good reason: for an organism to maintain its orderly state, it has to dump disordered states into its universe.
You take water, but after some time, you will feel like taking a piss. You eat food but over time, you might want to hope you have not run out of tissue paper by the time you start your business.
Open systems tend to dump irretrievable and useless energy into their universe.
One of the greatest ordered systems is black holes. Physicists have demonstrated how black holes contribute to the generation of a lot of entropy in the universe.
In common parlance, black holes tend to pee or poo a lot.
In short, the second law does not in any way dismiss evolution. It supports it, which brings us to the two laws of thermodynamics. I’ll describe them in simple terms:
The first law is the law of conservation of energy.
The second law is the law of depletion of useful energy.
Alternatively:
The first law is the law of malleable energy
The second law is the law of useless energy
As the preacher of alternative views, here’s the third way:
The first law is the law of conservation
The second law is the law of non-conservation
It is this second law that makes us grow old.
It makes you exasperated when your computer shuts down without you saving your work. It makes you angry when you have sat down with your meal and drink but have no idea where the remote is. It makes you hold your tongue when the landlord comes asking for the rent.
In nature, your landlord is your universe. Sadly.
Mejja, the Kenyan artist, put it in a song — usiniharibie siku bana landlord. (Landlord, don’t ruin my day!)
The second law of thermodynamics, like the landlord, ni tafash tu! (It’s a nuisance)
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