Of Aging and Entropy
Bill Meredith
If memory serves (I wasn’t actually there),
it was sometime in the late 1880’s that the
renowned British physicist, Lord Kelvin,
announced that all of the important scientific
discoveries had been made. He allowed that there
would still be employment for scientists; they
could still do research, but it would be on
things like refining measurements of the speed
of light to more and more decimals.
The fun of
real discovery, he said, was a thing of the
past. Well, Kelvin was a legitimately great
scientist, but that was one time he should have
kept his mouth shut. Within 10 years,
radioactivity was discovered, and (this is a
family newspaper) all heck broke loose. In the
following decade came the Theory of Relativity
and the discovery of subatomic particles in
physics; biologists discovered Mendelian
genetics and established ecology as a rigorous
discipline, and all of the other sciences made
equally revolutionary innovations.
The
self-correcting processes of science went into
full swing; old theories that couldn’t explain
these new discoveries were discarded, and new
theories sprang up faster than mushrooms. By the
time I was getting started as a scientist in the
1950’s, my teachers could point out that the
only law of classical science that had stood the
test of time without being either modified or
disproved since Kelvin’s unfortunate
proclamation was the Second Law of
Thermodynamics.
It must have been sometime in my senior year
in high school that I first encountered the
Second Law of Thermodynamics. Mr. Rudy, my
physics teacher, challenged the class to connect
a generator to a motor so the electricity made
by the generator would run the motor, which in
turn would run the generator. It couldn’t be
done, of course; it was the old conundrum of the
perpetual motion machine. Some of the energy in
the electricity was lost as frictional heat, and
could not be recovered.
The unrecoverable heat
was called entropy, Mr. Rudy said, and that was
the essence of the Second Law. There was more to
it than that, of course... a lot of very complex
mathematics, and I never did understand it very
well, but I liked to quote it because just the
name of it sounded so impressive. Later, in
graduate school, I learned that the Second Law
is the underlying principle in the theory of
ecosystems; and now, late in life, I have come
to realize that it is the controlling principle
of my personal existence as well. The gist of it
is that whenever you have a complex structure
like a cell, a human body or an ecosystem, you
must expend energy to maintain that structure;
and whenever you expend energy for any purpose,
some is lost as waste heat.
Without the energy,
order can’t be maintained, and, as the
physicists’ equations prove, disorder results.
Ergo, entropy (the physicists’ word for
disorder) tends to accumulate in the universe;
whenever we release energy by breaking down
orderly things such as fuels or foods, we
contribute to the accumulation of disorder.
This, of course, produces our body heat; it also
contributes to global warming. But worse, the
instant we stop using energy to maintain order,
things start going downhill... disorder
reigns... chaos abounds.
The best example of this that I’ve found is
our basement. Every fall I sort the products of
the summer’s canning and arrange them on the
shelves by date, newest on the left and oldest
on the right, and call my wife to admire the
orderly arrays of brightly colored jars; and she
promises faithfully to use the oldest ones
first. The year goes by, stuff gets eaten, and over the course of the next
summer a couple hundred jars of newly-canned
fruit and vegetables make their way to the
basement and mix themselves into randomized
piles on the floor. Meanwhile, the jars on the
shelves mysteriously shuffle themselves both by
species and date. Chaos abounds; entropy rules
again.
My wife seems to have a fairly high tolerance
for entropy, but she reached her limit last
November when she went down to get a jar of
green beans for Thanksgiving dinner and found
that she couldn’t reach it because too many
jars of other stuff were piled in front of the
shelves. Her solution to the problem, as always,
was to turn to me and say, "You’ve got to
do something.
Go down there and organize
[emphasis original] things." It’s not
that she doesn’t believe in the laws of
physics; she just believes they shouldn’t get
in the way when she has made up her mind. So,
following the annual ritual, I spent the next
week or so trying to reverse the Second Law. It
soon became evident that there were more new
jars than the shelves could hold; the only
solution was to remove the oldest jars from the
shelves and carry them to a pile near the door
to be thrown out. It pained me to do this,
because I abhor waste; nevertheless, it probably
was a good idea... one of the jars contained
pickles canned in 1973, and if I’d eaten them
I probably wouldn’t be here writing about it.
Lately I’ve observed that as I get older,
my supply of energy is being converted to
entropy faster than it used to. This came home
with finality the other day when I noticed my
wife was looking at seed catalogs and starting
to make garden noises; just then, I remembered
that I had run out of energy last November, and
the pile of jars of old canned goods is still
sitting by the basement door, waiting to be
thrown out. Here we are in March already; the
year is 1/6 gone, St. Patrick’s Day will be
here before we know it, and somewhere my
grandfather is watching to see if I get the
potatoes planted on schedule.
I may make that
deadline, but things look questionable for the
rest of the year. The world seems to be in about
the same shape that I am. We’re coming out of
the second-driest winter on record, El Nino
appears to be forming in the South Pacific, and
prospects for the garden are uncertain at this
point. We can always hope; the possibility is
that, come November, there will be another pile
of jars to be sorted in the basement. It’s
pretty certain, though, that I won’t have more
energy to deal with it. Physicists have known
for a long time that when it comes to entropy,
there are three rules: 1, you can’t win; 2,
you can’t break even; and 3, you can’t get
out of the game.