![]() ![]() The sheer magnitude of disorder they generate hour by hour, minute by minute, is just staggering. Once I’ve organized things enough that I can start my project, I must regularly take time to reorganize and clean so that I can continue making progress on my project.2Īs a proud father of three little girls, I have ample evidence that kids are amazing little entropy machines. ![]() I must do some work to reverse the entropy that has accumulated since the last project before I can begin because the workbench is covered in wood scraps and tools there are boards and papers and manuals and drill bits and wrenches and car parts and (because this is Hawaii) beach sand all over every available surface. Usually, when I begin a new project, I cannot just start building. I have a modest little shop set up in my tiny garage at home. It is the unavoidable part of all energy expenditure that is unavailable for work.įor example, I enjoy woodworking. The natural tendency of all things: Nature. A consequence of this is that you have to expend a significant amount of your time and effort cleaning up after yourself, reorganizing your surroundings and your tools at least enough so that they remain useful.Įntropy means disorder. It's just a side effect of living your life in order to accomplish anything (like making a sandwich or brushing your teeth), you end up disordering your surroundings. and all of this happens without any extra effort on your part. You see entropy in a more general sense in the observation that your room always seems to get cluttered, dishes are always waiting to be washed in the kitchen, the floor always needs sweeping, your desk is always a mess. When you peddle that bike, a significant portion of the energy you use goes to overcoming friction, which dissipates that energy as heat, warming up and disordering your surroundings.1 Understanding entropy allows chemists and physicists to predict directionality and spontaneity in chemical reactions and other physical processes. ![]() For example, if you use a hand pump to fill your bike tire with air, some of the energy you expend is wasted in warming up the pump and the tire. Physicists in the 1800s realized that any time energy is used to do work, some portion of that energy is unavoidably lost as heat to the surroundings. Entropy as a concept is simple enough to understand because you experience it every day. Today, I would like to speak about entropy: spiritual entropy. By the way, if any of you kids out there ever encounter a similar situation, and you end up wondering if you can just sweep all that sugar off the floor and back into the bin without mom noticing. Interestingly, what took them maybe five glorious minutes to create took me hours to clean up. The kitchen was a winter wonderland, and my sisters looked just like little sugared donuts. Soon, however, it became apparent even to me that the word they were calling out in such joyous chorus was, in fact, "sugar." I quickly investigated and found that my sisters had discovered mom's five-gallon bin of white sugar and were flinging armfuls into the air in delirious ecstasy. I was downstairs watching TV, like the conscientious babysitter that I was, when I heard my sisters in the kitchen upstairs excitedly calling out a word that sounded like "stickers!" I shrugged and went back to watching my Transformers cartoons (this was the 80's). ![]() I vividly remember babysitting my four little sisters one afternoon when I was about 12. ![]()
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