Entropy: Physics-Powered Philosophy

Strictly speaking, there are three things you should never bring up on a first date – sex, religion, and politics. These proscriptions are a fine start, but I would like to condemn a fourth subject to the abyss: entropy. If you've limped through a college physics course, you know all about this elusive property of the universe. To be more candid, you recognize the name as “the one that sounds like enthalpy”, but the line between the two concepts got blurred somewhere between your second exam and your fourth Busch Light. I write this as a confession, not a condemnation. Similarly, I confess that an entropic monologue on the second law of thermodynamics makes the probability of a second date with the brunette across the table fall to zero. Now, I pour out the musings of this contrived conversation in hopes that you will be more entertained than the most recent fixture in my saga of one-and-dones.

The second law of thermodynamics declares that “the state of entropy of the entire universe, as an isolated system, will always increase over time.” As any rational person would do, I am going to bend the truth and provide over-simplified definitions that cater to my agenda. My first sin will be to connect the concept of entropy with a much more familiar term: chaos. Entropy is better described as generalized disorder, and even more accurately characterized by the random motion of particles in a system (motion that is unable to perform work). I’ll stick to chaos, thank you very much. As chaos increases, entropy increases. When you tidy up your room – whether acting under duress of your mother or not – the entropy of your room is relatively low. As the days roll on and books, clothes, trinkets and dishes become scattered about at random, entropy increases. Your room is more disordered, so the entropy is higher. The second law of thermodynamics states that this is inevitable – the state of entropy will always increase over time. The caveat is that you must be dealing with an isolated system: one that does not exchange matter or energy with its surroundings. In this sense, the analogy is imperfect. My bedroom is certainly not an isolated system; however, when it’s time to assign blame for the socks on the floor and the dishes on the dresser, my finger will point shamelessly at the face of entropy.

For my next trick, I’d like to pretend that our universe is definitively singular, that there are no parallel universes, and that space and time are coterminous at the “boundaries” of this universe. In a sense, this assumption is predicated whenever we refer to our universe as an isolated system. It cannot exchange matter or energy with its surroundings because there are no surroundings. It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the universe as a snow globe in a dark room, but that’s not quite right. There is no dark room; there is no space or time at all outside the confines of the universe; the snow globe is all there is. Some years ago, a few wicked smart folks decided that the rest of us were a little too content in our snow globe, so they fired up their TI-84 calculators and began positing theories of parallel universes, quantum entanglement, and a “we live in a simulation” flavor of existentialism. The two paradigms collided, and the ensuing arguments have proven to be intensely vociferous and commensurately fruitless. My argument is that, philosophically, we’re all on the same side in this debate – we just drew an arbitrary line in the sand because we’re humans and don’t know what else to do.

I mean that to be more than a passing sententious remark. To understand why, I have to take everything I pretend to know about the second law of thermodynamics and translate it from physics into philosophy. I understand this is a lot like handing The Art of War to a French four-year-old and asking him to translate it from its original Chinese into Arabic. Perhaps you can take this work, hang it on your fridge, and give me a little pat on the head when I’m finished.

Remember, for our sake, entropy is synonymous with chaos and disorder. In an isolated system, this chaos increases inevitably, and in the long run, things always move from order to disorder. The analogy that I hope to draw is that, when we constrict ourselves and consider only the things we know, the things that are comfortable, the things that we can put a finger on and name, the chaos in our lives increases. When we insist that there is nothing outside of our universe and nothing beyond the physical world, we create an isolated system – one in which the entropy of our minds can only increase. I am not advocating for a belief in the multiverse; rather, I recognize the importance of having something outside of ourselves with which we can exchange energy, if not matter.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about man’s inveterate search for an escape from our radical freedom and responsibility. He observed the propensity within each of us to seek not only justification for our thoughts and actions, but a doctor’s prescription for them. When confronted with the absurdity of one’s beliefs and behaviors, it is comforting to ascribe them to the teachings of a particular institution or school of thought. In this sense, Sartre was critical of nationalism, capitalism, religion, and anything in-between. I tend to agree with a few of his premises, but I have neither the genius nor the capacity for despair to write a book titled Being and Nothingness. Rather than criticize the human condition of outsourcing our opinions, I see it as an excellent middle ground. From the religiosity of the past two millennia, through the transcendentalism of the 19th century, to the post-modern existentialism whose vocabulary percolates even into contemporary science, we all have somewhere to turn. To me, it is not as important to debate about where we should look as it is to note that we all look at some point in our lives.

When we are confronted with challenges beyond spilled coffee and dog turds on the floor, it is common for our thoughts to extend beyond the physical world. The sufferings contained within the lonely halls of a substance abuse rehabilitation facility cannot be assimilated into my understanding of the world the same way as a fresh brown lump on the carpet can. I must integrate what I see and feel with my religious views, my political opinions, and personal dispositions. Oftentimes, the paradigm that is most blatantly confronted by a new slice of the world is the one that ultimately provides the most comfort. I find that if I isolate my system and don’t allow for the exchange of energy or matter, I usually experience an explosion of disorder and chaos in my mind and soul. Personally, I turn to my faith, my favorite philosophers and authors, and the previously mentioned transcendentalism movement when the world shows me something I wasn’t ready to see, feel, or know. With that said, I want to be careful to avoid the banal ideology surrounding “opening up and letting your feelings out” which often provides a moment of catharsis but no lasting change.

The first time a cradle Catholic picks up David Hume, there is a feeling of “somethings got to go.” The obstinate objectivism of the Catechism simply does not jibe with the skepticism of the most famous Scottish philosopher. In my case, Hume was tabled and labeled as a casuist with a penchant for stirring up trouble. His empiricism continued to eat at me, however. Clinging firm to the snow globe universe that I had created for myself, I refused to consider anything that didn’t feat neatly into the categorical boxes I had made. But Hume kept prying at these boxes with a crowbar, and the state of chaos in my system continued to build. Fortunately, I found Aquinas before an entropic meltdown could transform me into a fire-breathing nihilist. When I read Peter Kreeft’s Summa of the Summa, I began to understand that the two views did not exist in an Either/Or relationship; instead, a Both/And characterization would be much more appropriate. Simply put, my system was opened, I could exchange energy and thought with my new surroundings, and the indomitably increasing disorder was halted. Of course, this process never ends, and we are constantly being exposed to new thought, new theories, new surroundings. In these moments of exposure, a belief in something transcendental acts as a bulwark against encroaching chaos and disorder.

As traditional religious views continue to lose popularity, a “new atheism” championed by leading quantum scientists such as Stephen Hawking and evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins has emerged. On the surface, new atheism is strictly material and does not concern itself with things outside of what can be observed. They will be the first to tell you that there is no bearded figure enthroned outside of space and time Who interacts with the universe He created. However, I don’t believe these individuals exist in an isolated system by any means. Consider an evolutionary psychologist like Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal. In his case, Evolution, not God, is the extracorporeal “force” that drives progress, for better or for worse. Phenomena in human behavior and psychology are understood in the context of natural selection, propagation of DNA, and epigenetics. Of course, Evolution is not a sentient being that guides the path of progress, but it is retrospectively implicated in every quirk of our species. For the atheistic, evolutionary psychologist, then, there is not necessarily a perpetually increasing state of chaos. Their system is not isolated, because just beyond the tangible world is an explanation and a source of ideas that is wholly intangible and transcendental. When confronted with new and challenging information, they have somewhere to look that is deeper and much more nuanced than the things they can see, smell, hear, touch, and taste.

In every case, even staunch nihilism, there is something external believed in and, therefore, something with which energy can be exchanged. Again, even if a person believes only in the simple ideology that there is nothing beyond what we can detect with our senses, this is a belief that can be used to assuage fears and integrate new information. It is paradoxical and nonsensical to say, “I believe in nothing!”; it would be akin to proclaiming, “look everyone! I found a square with three sides!”

The premise of this argument is unfortunately quite trite. I am certainly not the first to identify a correlation between closed-mindedness and disorder, but it does seem a bit counterintuitive. One would think that more information would result in more chaos. But this life is always going to give us more than we can seemingly handle. True peace and order is found not by building an impenetrable shield around your snow globe; only by being rid of the glass enclosure altogether can we hope to the appreciate the full scope of art, philosophy, science, and everything else the history of human thought and imagination has left for us. If we insist on limiting ourselves to the boundaries of our own small world, the rest of the universe will come knocking, and “the state of [chaos]…in an isolated system, will always increase over time.”

To close, let me cite a text message I just received from the world’s least likely beekeeper, my dad. He forwarded an article describing the work of the recipients of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics and referenced a brilliant quantum mechanics professor he has long been friends with: “according to [name redacted], they proved that the universe doesn’t exist!” Without a doubt, George Berkeley is smiling in his grave at Oxford.