On a recent visit back to Auburn, I took a stroll through the college bookstore and saw that my favorite engineering instructor, Dr. David Dyer, was still teaching Thermodynamics. To put it blandly, this is the study of the movement and conversion of heat to perform work. As an example, in a steam locomotive, water is heated in a boiler and turns into steam. That steam pushes on pistons which turns a drive wheel that propels the locomotive forward.
Three laws underpin the study of thermodynamics, and as engineering students, we spent most of our time working with its Second Law. The full-blown mathematical representation took up an entire blackboard in a lecture hall, but it can be distilled down to "the entropy of a closed system is always increasing", and entropy, as defined by Dictionary.com, is a lack of order or decline into disorder.
We're all already intrinsically familiar with this concept. Whether that closed system is your hot coffee mug, orderly living room, or manicured backyard garden, without any corrective input from you, all three systems slide inexorably into disorder. Your coffee will grow cold, clutter will collect in your living room, and your garden will become overgrown.
Many scientists believe this foretells the fate of the universe. If you consider the entire universe a "system", at some point, entropy will overtake everything and the universe will eventually succumb to heat death, like your hot coffee in a mug that eventually grows cold.
Entropy rears its head in all systems. Andrea was listening to a podcast where a question was posed. "In our biology, a cell is able to create duplicates of itself, dividing rather than dying. If this is the case, why do we age and die?" Entropy inserts itself into the process. Cellular division is not a perfect mechanism and errors are gradually and continuously introduced. These eventually overcome our biological systems and our bodies fail.
There are even theological ramifications. Many philosophers and philosophies would say human nature is chaos (entropy) personified. Any parent of a two-year-old could validate this. Without the imposition of some self control, we'd effortlessly slide into anarchy. Because disorder is easy and chaos is simple, the path to heaven has been described as a narrow gate with a constricted road while the "Bad Place" gets a multilane superhighway.
AC/DC explored this juxtaposition with the release of "Highway to Hell". According to the unassailable Internet news source, The Babylon Bee, "Bon Scott had a clear understanding of man’s natural inclination toward sin" or, for our purposes, entropy and chaos. I'm not certain if Scott was attempting to make a theological argument for the fallen nature of man, but I am certain that he crafted a kick ass tune that's become one of the band's greatest contributions to the canon of rock and roll. Besides, between you and me, there's nothing wrong with a little chaos. Welcome to Rock-tober.
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