Life, the universe, and everything

I used to enjoy reading textbooks about the “big” picture. You know, the history and future of the universe—that sort of thing. Unfortunately, I loaned most of my books to someone who never returned them. Still, it’s a subject that has always fascinated me.

Take the subject of entropy, for example. Entropy in the engineering sense is lost heat (the second law of thermodynamics: entropy of a system always increases or remains the same).  Another way of putting that is that thermal energy always flows from higher temperature to lower temperature. In layman’s terms: things cool off. Eventually, everything in the universe will become the same temperature (heat death). What has this to do with anything? Well, one way of describing time itself is the movement from low entropy to higher entropy. At the end, everything will be homogeneous (absolute entropy).

This suggests that a time existed when the universe had no entropy. We could describe that state as being infinitely hot. Now, to move from infinity to a measurable interval is clearly impossible. The best we can ever do is approach closer and closer to infinity, but we can never reach it. That’s what infinity means: no end point. That is why we cannot talk about the “beginning” of the universe, or “what happened before the beginning.” The best we can do is get closer and closer to a “starting point,” but we’ll never get there. We can talk about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second of the existence of the universe, but we will never get to the “beginning.”

Now, the movement of time from near-zero entropy to near-infinite entropy is only one way of looking at it. Not everything is always breaking down and disintegrating as it dissipates its heat energy. Things do get put together. Like stars, chicken eggs, and social structures. This suggests a force that is working against entropy; in other words, moving from near-infinite to near-zero entropy. So, are there two arrows of time, headed in opposite directions?

Maybe an example would help. Drop a chicken egg on the floor. Its structure of shell, yolk, and sac is destroyed. In other words, it’s a mess. Now, reassemble this mess into a perfect egg. You can’t do it. In this case, entropy has increased and the only way back would be to reverse time. On the other hand, where did the egg come from? It began as a single cell in a chicken. It divided and kept dividing as different parts of it began to assume different structures. In the end, we have an egg with yolk near the middle, a sac wrapped around it, and all encased in a hard shell. This is a movement away from the “natural” process of always increasing entropy, seemingly violating the second law of thermodynamics. I think that a better way to describe it is the process of repackaging energy. The chicken actually “pulls” energy from its food and converts some of it into egg. The egg or, if it develops fully and produces another chicken, will eventually give up its energy to another life-form in the form of food.

You could describe the entire process of the evolution of the universe, of the planets, of life, etc. as working against rot and decay. It would be nice to think that—it has a nice positive ring to it and can be used to justify the belief in the existence of a higher order, a God, or a purpose. The assemblage of atoms into molecules, of molecules into stars and planets, of planets into systems—some of which support life—has an almost heroic aspect to it. But, I want to draw your attention to a very simple and common observation.

Where do rocks come from? They are created when materials are subjected to incredible pressure and heat, found, for example, in the earth’s mantel. And, where do they go? They get broken down by wind, water, cycles of heat and cold, and eventually end up as sand. And, where does the sand go? Eventually, it gets swallowed up in the movements of the tectonic plates and remixed back into the mantel.

And, when did this process begin and when will it end? Well, it began when dust and rocks coalesced into a planet large enough to support such a process. It will end when the planet disintegrates back into dust and rocks. And that dust and those rocks will eventually coalesce to form another star or planet. And so on, until the universe runs out of heat energy, and everything will stop forever. Unless, of course, the universe collapses back into itself, thus reversing the flow of entropy and building up unbelievable temperatures once again that will restart the process.

Just something to think about.