We all have order and disorder in our lives – and in the universe.
Back in March, I gave my room a good spring clean. Since then, disorder has gradually set in, and so now my room is as messy as ever. But from a theoretical physics point of view, there is a natural explanation for why my room gradually goes from being tidy to being messy: the tendency of entropy to increase over time.
Entropy is often described as a measure of disorder, but it is more accurately described as a measure of how many microstates there are for every macrostate. In the context of messy rooms, we might think of a macrostate as specifying a general degree of messiness – so when a mother disapprovingly tells her son “Look at the state of your room,” she’s talking about a macrostate. A microstate, on the other hand, would constitute a detailed description of someone’s room which might include among other things the locations of all the books and bits of paper in the room and how far open the drawers are. The reason rooms tend to get messy over time is that there are a lot more ways (ie microstates) that a room can be in a messy (macro)state than in a tidy (macro)state. So there are lots of different ways I can leave a load of books and papers on my desk, but there are relatively fewer ways I can leave them neatly lined up on my shelf or tid- ied away in a closed drawer. If I pick up a book or a paper to read and put it down without thinking where I’m putting it, then the chan-ces are that I’m going to leave it in a place that will make my room look messier.
Now there’s something to be said for having a little bit of mess in one’s life. Tidying things up takes a lot of effort which could be spent on doing something else. When Elizabeth Anscombe was asked how she managed to devote so much time to philosophy as well as bringing up seven children, she replied: “You just have to realise that dirt doesn’t matter.” She would have been expressing a similar thought had she said “entropy doesn’t matter”.
Some people, however, are deeply troubled by the fact that entropy increases over time. What worries them is the prospect of the so-called heat death of the universe. The heat death of the universe won’t happen suddenly but will rather be a very gradual process in which all the heat of the universe will be uniformly dispersed across it. When this process is complete, the universe will be very dark and cold and incapable of sustaining any life. But rest assured, this is not going to happen any time soon. If you can imagine the figure 1 followed by 106 noughts, then that’s approximately how many years it will be until the heat death of the universe occurs.
Nevertheless, even though it is a long way off, some people still find the prospect of the heat death of the universe rather depressing, as though it somehow suggests that everything is futile. What might we say to someone who holds such a gloomy outlook?
Well, for a start, we don’t know for certain that this is how the universe will end. The heat death of the universe is only a conjecture. The fact that physicists do experiments to test their conjectures suggests that physicists are not in the business of telling us how the physical universe must behave. if God so willed it, things could turn out very differently.
But we could also challenge the gloomsters over whether they are right to think of entropy as a measure of disorder. If their understanding of entropy was correct, then perhaps their gloomy outlook would be justified – after all, the prospect of the universe falling into complete disorder at the end of time is not a particularly cheerful thought. But it is not obvious that we have to think of entropy in this way. If we were instead to think of entropy in terms of microstates and macrostates, then entropy just measures how much more information we need beyond the macrostate to give a complete description of reality in terms of a microstate. From our limited human perspective, the amount of information we would need to form a complete description of reality will go on increasing until the end of the universe. But from God’s perspective, His understanding of the universe is always complete, and those whom He has chosen to enjoy the beatific vision at the end of time, will at last obtain a share in His understanding, and when they do, they will see how the complete history of the universe reflects the infinite glory of God.
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