Blood Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 6: Entropy

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible (see his author website). Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles; Light Apparel; Flow of Blood; Wisdom Builds Her House; Rock Bunnies (all reviewed earlier), Entropy (reviewed here), Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air (all reviewed later). As in the previous stories, Entropy teaches some deep science in a context of humor.

 Manfred and Meave are tech nerds who have their whole lives in perfect order: they know exactly what and when they would eat (spotlessly cooked meals); what they would play (Monopoly over and over); and when they would get married. Then their perfect order was disrupted by entropy, which is disorder. First, Manfred’s perfectly ordered meal is disrupted when he hides an engagement ring inside of a beet for Meave to find; second, the astonishingly beautiful illegal immigrant Cornelia arrives unexpectedly and gets Manfred in bed with her. Then she brings her whole family. Meave’s latent energy explodes when she finds out about this…until she finds out that she really likes Cornelia’s family. When Cornelia’s family leaves, they do something that makes it impossible for Manfred and Meave to ever be torn apart again.

Entropy is disorder. Everything that happens—every physical transition, every chemical reaction—results in a loss of energy (First Law of Thermodynamics) and a loss of orderliness. That is, an increase in entropy, which the discoverer of entropy, Josiah Willard Gibbs, reportedly called mixedupness. To a certain extent, you can reverse the second law by adding extra energy and information about how to use it. Big molecules break down into smaller ones unless you give them some energy and an enzyme that “knows” how to use it. Don’t you wish you had this explained to you by a writer like Rice when you took chemistry?

The spiritual lesson in this story is that you have to be ready for surprises to come along, rather than imposing your own idea of order on all of life. Being a rigid Puritan—none of whom read this blog, I assume—is not only bad, but also impossible. This lesson makes up about half of the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. But also, you have to be open to surprises if you are to notice the wonder of creation. Cornelia tells Manfred, “You have a map of the heavens, you think, because humans have made up names for the stars and drawn little lines between them. You think that constellation over there looks like a Big Dipper. Our people think it looks like a Volkswagen Bug. Just kidding. But, seriously. Do you have a map of the Streets of Gold? When you get glimpses of heaven, and you get them every day, it leaves you bewildered. But you better get used to it. You better be content with feeling a little bit lost, because the heavens are so big, you will never have answers to everything.”

This story also squarely faces one of the most important current issues of our time: illegal immigration and what ICE can or should do about it. Rice does not, of course, provide an answer.

Republicans and Christians: In the Entropy Business

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the overall amount of entropy (disorder) increases over time in the universe. Political and religious conservatives have parasitized this Second Law for their own profit.

The business plan is simple: just create havoc, disorder, mayhem, hatred, confusion (or, as scientists call all of this, entropy) and then sell people the things they need to survive in this entropic environment.

And, by the way, call this entropy “freedom.”

The Republican Party uses this plan in almost every way. Let me just use one example: guns. Republicans want everyone to have guns all the time everywhere. If you don’t have a gun, and somebody shoots you, it’s your own damn fault. What happens when you increase the number of guns in circulation among human beings, some of whom are ready to pull a trigger whenever they get angry? Predictably, you get more shootings. How do you protect yourselves from shooters? You need to get a gun also. The NRA keeps laws that restrict firearms from being enacted, resulting in more shootings; AND they represent manufacturers who will sell you firearms. The Republicans are in the entropy business: they create an environment of gun violence, then claim the solution to gun violence is more guns—then they sell you guns.

This is the plan in Oklahoma, anyway. The Oklahoma House passed a bill that would allow anyone who is legally able to carry a firearm to bring them to school. The governor vetoed the bill, but state representatives are threatening a special summer session to override the veto, and the NRA threatens to mount a campaign against her.

The Republican business plan:

• Create an environment of gun violence.
• Convince people that guns are the answer to gun violence.
• Sell guns.
• Make profit.

The fundamentalist churches are also in the entropy business. The first thing they do is to tell you that, unless you accept their doctrines and become a Republican and stand your ground regarding unlimited access to guns, then you are going to hell. If you even question Donald Trump, you are going to hell. They make everyone in their churches feel like all of society around them is damned, mostly because of Democrats. But, they offer the solution: give them your obedience and your money. The fundamentalist churches make lots of money and get lots of people to obey the Republican Party by convincing people that the only way to not be overwhelmed by the entropy of the world is to join them.

The Christian business plan:

• Create an environment of hell.
• Convince people that Republican churches are the only way to keep out of hell.
• Sell church membership.
• Make profit.

These business plans are working nicely. According to a recently updated CNN article, there have been 22 school shootings in the first 20 weeks of 2018.

Most of the progress over evolutionary time has been in the local reduction of entropy. While, according to the Second Law, total entropy must always increase in the universe, it can and does decrease in localized systems, whether cells or organisms or ecosystems. You would think that fundamentalist creationists would celebrate the reduction of entropy as proof of God. They used to. But apparently this is not what they do any more.

Jeremy Rifkin: Saying Everything about Everything

Jeremy Rifkin is the author of dozens of books on almost every subject. He has a voluminous mind and can marshal hundreds of facts to illustrate his points. But he made so many points that, at least in some cases, he misunderstood his basic concepts. One of these concepts is entropy, and his misunderstandings filled a book called Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World, originally published in 1980, long before the widespread acceptance of global warming science.

The second law of thermodynamics states that with every physical or chemical transformation, the total amount of disorder increases. The amount of disorder can decrease within an open system, but only at the expense of greater disorder outside of the open system. The inside of a refrigerator can get cooler and more orderly, for example disorderly water molecules can freeze into orderly ice, but only at the expense of heat production by the coils.

Rifkin’s book has, I believe, a very vague thrust. He believed that all of our problems—and nearly every problem in the world shows up somewhere in the book—are the result of the second law of thermodynamics. Well, if this is the case, then it would seem hopeless for us to try to solve any of our problems; they would seem to be physically inevitable.

But there is something we can do about the second law. At the very least, we can stop helping it. As the joke goes, “Mistakes will happne, but…must you give them so much help?” Many of the things that political conservatives demand are things that facilitate the second law, and help to increase disorder. It almost seems like conservatives want to help the second law of thermodynamics, as if it needs any help. Things would be a lot better in the world if conservatives just didn’t try to make things more disorganized.

Probably the major example is that political conservatives want to let the second law of thermodynamics take care of guns. Over centuries, we have built a society in which law enforcement officials maintain public order, and disputes are resolved through courts. But many political conservatives want to create a world in which order is maintained and justice practiced by everyone having firearms. If the people in that church in Charleston had had guns, said one National Rifle Association official (not necessarily on behalf of the whole organization), they could have stopped the shooter by shooting him. One of the core beliefs of political conservatives is the Second Amendment, which defends the existence of “a well-regulated militia.” To the NRA and the politicians it has bought, however, instead of a well-regulated militia, we should have a trigger-happy group of white men with assault weapons ready to shoot first and ask questions later. As I have noted in an earlier entry, white police frequently shoot unarmed black men. But police are trained and conscientious. You need no training and no conscience to join a white “militia”.

This is one reason that Donald Trump has such an easy view of the world. Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, ride along with the flow of entropy. The world is becoming more disorderly, and they ride the wave of entropy as if it were a bronco. Things are getting messed up; Republicans whoop and holler as they mess things up even more. Meanwhile, during every Democratic administration, the president tries to clean up the mess, stop war and create peace, reduce the deficit, etc. But Democrats will never succeed, because Republicans are tapping into the juggernaut of entropy.

Rifkin was right that we can and should resist the second law of thermodynamics in the few local places and brief times that we can. But he also misunderstood the law. He applied it to the Earth, which is an open system. One of his statements was that not a single blade of grass can grow that will not reduce the ability of another blade of grass to grow in the future. This is not true. Entropy will eventually make the Earth die and disintegrate, but this will happen whether grass grows or not. Rifkin, like many other people, got entropy mixed up. But most of us who get it mixed up do not write books about it.

The net effect of reading Rifkin’s Entropy was to be left baffled, rather than feeling geared up to do something to help to diminish the problems of the world, if only mildly and briefly. Genius he may be, but this book (and others, such as Algeny) will not necessarily help you understand or cope with the world better.