Viswanathan K's Thoughts

One of Isaac Asimov’s tales is titled The Final Question . Well into the future, the very hi-tech inhabitants of the future are worried. By the second law of thermodynamics! Or rather, the implied consequence of that law.   Without getting into the details of what the law is, let’s focus on the consequence that is scary. The law implies that everything in the universe will eventually cool down and decay. In that setup, no free energy will exist to drive any further processes. It is called the “heat death of the universe”.   Or as TS Eliot poetically put it: “This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”   So these hi-tech inhabitants ask their cosmic supercomputer: How can the second law of thermodynamics be overturned?   The supercomputer starts working on the question. Eventually, long after all life has ended, the stars have died out, and as nothing new emerges in the universe, and the universe is on the cusp of the gloomy end...

When I thought of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I (obviously) thought of it as an engineer (disorder, entropy, blah blah). But no more. Thanks to this amusing and profound take by Steven Pinker, a non-science guy, who listed that very law as the scientific term/concept that deserves to be known widely ! So what makes the Second Law worth knowing? Pinker points out the psychological benefits of knowing this law! “The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.” The Second Law answers or rather, flips the why-poverty question on its head: “Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter ...