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About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Castles in the Sand
Imagine two scenes. One is a beach. The other is the same beach with a sandcastle on it. The trick is to try to determine which one came before the other on the timeline.
The rule of entropy is that order tends to decrease and disorder tends to increase with time. Still picturing those scenes? Which one has more disorder? Wouldn't you think that the beach with the sand all in random disarray (and not with a tiny portion sculpted into the shape of Ludwig the Mad's Neuschwanstein) is more disordered?
The popular view of entropy says to place your money on the non-becastled beach as being the newer picture. Random actions of wind and wave and tide is way more likely to scatter sandcastles than to build them. Right?
Part of the confusion here is the word "tends". Allowances are made for the fact that sometimes order will appear out of chaos—or at least appear to appear, if you understand what I'm saying. If you flip a penny ten times in a row, there's a measurable probability that all ten coin-flips will result in "heads". Looks like enemy action, but is actually still random. It's a one in a thousand chance.
Beach without sandcastle. Beach with sandcastle. According to the popular views regarding order and disorder, beach without sandcastle follows beach with sandcastle. Because it's a roughly one-in-a-gazillion chance that random actions of waves and wind will construct anything that remotely resembles a castle.
I'm ignoring the human element, you say? Shut up a minute. I'll get to it. Let's stick with the beaches for a moment.
TIme to think bigger.
Imagine all of the beaches of the world. Imagine them as if you could see them all from orbit in enough detail to be able to see if there are sandcastles or not. Imagine them all a billion years ago.
They ought to be pretty much castle-free. Wouldn't you think?
Run the image forward in time. Still virtually castle-free beaches for almost all of that time, then, maybe a million or two years ago, you start getting sculpted lumps. And over the next couple of million years, the lumps start getting castle-like and proliferating. Now, at any given time, there are maybe a thousand or two sandcastles on all the beaches of the world. Up from maybe fifty or so two hundred years ago. Up from maybe ten about ten thousand years ago.
As time advances, sandcastles become more numerous and better defined in shape and structure, on average.
Okay, okay. I can see you're turning purple trying not to say something. Go ahead and say it. Those castles aren't being constructed by random wave and wind action. People are making them.
Consider, though. Some people firmly believe that the chemicals that make up life were assembled via random wave and wind action in the oceans. And over a couple of billion years those chemicals clumped together and fought amongst themselves for resources until we get, in terms of the obvious desires of all of the beaches of the world, specialized forces for the spontaneous creation of sandcastles. In steadily increasing numbers.
Prokaryotes and eukaryotes and amorphous colonies and fish and amphibians and reptiles and mammals and primates and thumbs and huge proof-of-concept pyramids and keeps and fortresses and, finally, knee-high sandcastles all over the world. From random wave and wind action.
Right.
Okay, we have a couple of different options:
1) Our planet, billions of years ago, was a super-complex super-ordered system that, as it ages and winds down, wastes its time and energy building human civilizations and sandcastles on the beach, and we can expect things to become more random and meaningless as "civilization" "progresses".
2) Life is a magical process and fucks with the science and math. Note: since entropy is a scientific concept and magic is not, do not expect many hardcore scientists to buy this one.
3) On a truly cosmic scale, averaged over a gazillion years, the complex processes that have evolved the growing phenomena of sandcastles on beaches is a slight one-in-a-gazillion-chance hiccup in the steadily sliding downward curve of Order into Disarray.
4) Order actually increases with respect to time instead of decreases, at least in certain circumstances and on useful time scales, with the popular definitions of order and disorder.
Let me say right up front that I don't have much use for options two and three. One posits magic and the other uses math that makes you divide by an arbitrarily large and possibly infinite term. I don't have much use for either. I don't believe in magic (in any other terms than a label for the general category of things I don't fully understand yet), and any math that makes you wait a nearly infinite amount of time to show a valid trend is functionally useless. You might as well tell me that the literary quality of writing in Hollywood is actually increasing with respect to time, on the average, but that we've just been witnessing a slight downward fluctuation over the past hundred years.
Option one seems to be implying that there was a God, but we're maggots thriving on his festering corpse and eventually we, too, will go away. I have to admit that's attractive, but I'll give it a miss as well since, in order to prove it, we'd have to have a much better scientific understanding of what a god is and what a god's life cycle must be like. This kinda combines both magic and infinite terms. No good.
That leaves option four, which is at least a scientifically provable/disprovable hypothesis.
Did I miss anything?
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Vidicon has a mysterious urge to go to the beach and build a sandcastle. |
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