The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Failure is the expected outcome
The following is an extract from Failure: Why Science is So Successful by Stuart Firestein.
Failure is supposed to happen. Science itself says so. No less than the Second Law of Thermodynamics demands it. You don’t argue with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I mean really, could they have found a scarier name for something than The Second Law of Thermodynamics? Who wants to tangle with something like that? I’ve always felt it had a kind of Old Testament ring to it that says, don’t mess with this fruit. But being scared off by that would be a real shame, because wrapped up in that scary moniker are a couple of elegant and essential ideas. And they are very useful for understanding failure properly.
This frightening sounding Law is merely the formal explanation of the term entropy. Now that may be another somewhat obscure-sounding word, but in fact it’s a pretty simple and very intuitive concept — except as it was presented to you in your high school physics textbook. Here’s what entropy is, mostly. You know how your desk, room, house, office, or car is always a mess no matter how much you try to organize it? Well the reason for that is entropy — and the Second Law.
You see, there are a limited number of ways that your desk, room, house, or car can be organized and orderly. But there are an unlimited, possibly infinite, number of ways it can be messed up. Books, for example, may belong on the bookshelf, and that’s the one way that they are organized. But they could be virtually anywhere else in your house, and all of those places would be included in the disorganized column. If you think like a Las Vegas casino owner — there are a limited number of ways to win, and a huge, maybe infinite, number of ways to lose — then which is more likely to happen more often and where does the house place its bet? Same with your desk: lots of ways to be a mess, and only a few ways to be neat. Clearly, then, it is far more likely that it will occupy one of the numerous messy states and far less likely to be in one of the much fewer neat states. Now here’s the kicker. The same thing is true for the whole universe. And that’s what the Second Law of Thermodynamics says, and entropy is a way to measure all that disorder. We could call it the sloppiness factor, but in this case entropy sounds more elegant, even if a bit more esoteric. So the next time someone suggests that you clean up your desk, or car, or whatever, just tell them it’s a hopeless battle against entropy and it’s not your fault.
The same entropy factor is at work in failure. Failure is the expected outcome according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. There are many more ways to fail than to succeed. Success, by definition, should be very limited. Failure is the default. Success requires an unusual, but possible, confluence of events in which entropy is temporarily reversed. This is reminiscent of Tolstoy’s famous remark that all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy its own way. You might call this the Anna Karenina factor, a kind of literary equivalent to entropy. Notice that Tolstoy felt the most interesting things to write about, to investigate, to explore, were the varied ways that families did not succeed, were not happy. His inspiration sprung from the myriad ways things went wrong. It’s not so different in science.
Stuart Firestein is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where his highly popular course on ignorance invites working scientists to come talk to students each week about what they don’t know. Dedicated to promoting science to a public audience, he serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program for the Public Understanding of Science and was awarded the 2011 Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for excellence in scholarship and teaching. He was also recently named an AAAS Fellow.
Image credit: Where It All Began, by mckinney75402. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
