CONTEST
Something Went Wrong? Blame Newton
Sir Isaac Newton was smarter than everybody, which made him surly and chronically blue. No wonder — he discovered the cause of failure. I think he liked screwing things up for people. The only time anyone ever saw him laugh was when an admirer asked him, “What’s your greatest discovery?” Newton was proud of his success at failure. He died a virgin, after all.
Before Newton, people considered failure to be God’s wrath. It was His tool for punishing sinners — although He also reserved the divine prerogative to “test” righteous people by plaguing them with unwarranted torture and tragedies. Just ask Job.
Newton discovered that failure isn’t God’s will — shit just happens. Rather than being omnipotent, responsible for every little thing, Newton’s God had nothing to do but sit back and watch blithely while the universe decomposed. That, and smite sinners.
Newton’s second law of thermodynamics guarantees everything will eventually fail. Put simply, entropy is the indomitable force that makes things fall apart. It’s like a cosmic blooper. Entropy is why, as Murphy’s Law states, if something can go wrong, it will. Don’t believe it? Just wait. Entropy is patient.
Some people associate Newton with designing the album cover for Dark Side of the Moon. Others remember him for the law of gravity. That’s a pretty good law, alright. It explains the moon’s orbit, the tides, and my wife’s moods. But, the potency of gravity compared to entropy is as Pabst Blue Ribbon is to 190 proof Everclear.
About five billion years ago, because of entropy, a supernova exploded. Its atoms dispersed across the universe like dandelion seeds in a puffball. Today, some of those atoms are in my body. I think it’s cool that I contain stardust. However, it occurred to me while cleaning my cat’s litterbox that I don’t want to know where else my atoms have been.
Personally, I welcome failure. Nature abhors success, so failure is a great equalizer. A successful person is merely overdue for failure. It’s empowering to ignore their advice. The inevitability of failure is good reason to conserve effort, but if despite my least efforts I fail to fail, I take a nap until entropy corrects for any accidental success. Entropy makes laziness wise and underachieving a virtue.
Ironically, Newton’s failures proved he was right. His quaint ideas about a clockwork universe were superseded by Einstein’s relativity. It too failed when quantum theory came along, which proposes that ultimate reality is uncertain, unmeasurable, and entangled — again, like my wife’s moods. Quantum theory may have already failed, too, but nobody understands it well enough to know.
Newton got the last laugh, though. While you can’t defeat entropy, you can slow it down. That’s why I live by his other great theory — an object at rest tends to stay at rest. Chillax, pirates.
Gregg Sapp writes the “Holidazed” series of satires.
