There is a belief – apparently widespread, but which usually goes unexpressed because it’s not the sort of thing people want to talk about – that we are doomed. People might believe this for various reasons of course, including human greed, bad leaders, the potential for nuclear accidents, climate change and so forth. But the belief I am referring to is about inescapable physics. Because whatever we do, disorder increases.
This idea was promoted by the Austrian scientist Erwin Schrodinger, in a book entitled What is Life? published in 1944. Schrodinger argued that even when we think we are creating order – by tidying the house, say – we can only do so within our local environment by taking – or “borrowing” – order from somewhere else. It is physically inescapable that the borrowed external order exceeds the local order we establish. The overall effect is a rise in global disorder. It’s an argument that has been made by other physicists since Schrodinger’s time.
This idea, that disorder increases whatever we do, is a popular interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics, which itself rests on a rigorous 200-year-old mathematical derivation. It is also, according to the British mathematician Ian Stewart, a load of old cobblers. According to Stewart, the second law is only relevant at the molecular scale; it doesn’t apply at the human scale, or the scale of life more generally.
I have spent many hours over many years trying to understand Stewart’s argument. I think I’m there at last. Which may be delusional, but it gives me a surprising amount of hope.
The chicken and the egg
Stewart uses the example of breaking an egg. He asks us to imagine putting the broken egg back together by finding all of the bits of eggshell and reassembling them in the right configuration. It is physically possible – but astronomically unlikely – that the bits might randomly reassemble themselves this way, like a video of smashing an egg run backwards. This is an illustration beloved by Schrodinger’s followers: it is much, much easier to destroy something intricate – something that is in a high-order low-entropy state initially – than it is to create it. Disorder rises, beauty fades, humanity fails, the universe ends in heat death.
Yet, as Stewart puts it in 17 Equations That Changed the World, this is not how a chicken makes an egg. The chicken doesn’t go around painstakingly finding all the right bits of shell and sticking them together in the right order. To a chicken, one bit of calcium carbonate is just as good as another. The chicken makes do with what it finds: figuratively speaking, it creates order out of what it has to hand (to wing?). It doesn’t need to borrow order from anywhere in so doing.
Indeed, one can think of intelligence – avian or human – as the capacity to discern/distil order/sense from a disordered environment. It’s related to perceptions of beauty …
Lake District
About once a year, I go walking for a day or few with a friend. This year it was in the Lake District. Whenever I go there, I can’t help but think that it’s a sheep-ravaged landscape. Beautiful but relatively barren. There is more life in the bits of woodland that still exist than in the open dales and fells. If it were not for the millennia of livestock farming, there would be much more woodland and much more life than there is.
And yet – it’s beautiful. Most people who go there, including myself, find the scenery uplifting despite its relative paucity of life. And this is an inspiring, and hope-inducing, human reaction. Especially among young people. Each generation finds beauty in a world ravaged by its predecessors.
The capacity to see beauty is akin to the capacity to discern order. It is the mark of an intelligent life-form. And while it is entirely possible that we will render the planet inhospitable for, or even uninhabitable by, future generations of people, this capacity is the source of my hope.
Climate change
25 years ago, in 2001, I left a job to try out self-employment. And to try, if possible, to make a living by persuading people to reduce energy demand and resource consumption in order to prevent climate change. (I lacked any clear sense of how to go about this and soon gave it up, at least as a personal means to make a living.) Over leaving drinks my old boss, a charming Welshman named Nigel Evans, expressed his view that people and politicians won’t react in time; that if scientists were correct in their assessment of the impact from human-related greenhouse gases, we would just have to adapt to a hotter world. Evans was being thoughtful and honest, but his viewpoint was not what I wanted to hear. I’ve spent most of the last quarter of a century clinging to the belief that he was wrong.
With reluctance, I now accept that he was right. Almost certainly right, that is. Ever since climate change came to the attention of the general public – and in spite of wishful thinking in various quarters at various times that we were finally getting to grips with the problem – global fossil fuel and greenhouse emissions have risen year on year, with a few relatively minor exceptions such as the Covid year of 2020.
Short-term local concerns always trump long-term global ones. Some of us get involved in things like community energy. In my home town of Reading, the Reading Hydro project on the Thames is much-loved. Deservedly so. But we would need about 1,000,000 such schemes to supply our national thirst for electricity. (This is surprisingly accurate. Reading Hydro generates about 320 MWh per annum. Our national demand is circa 320,000,000 MWh per annum. I’m personally involved in rooftop solar rather than hydro, but have chosen this project as an example because the numbers are neat.) That’s about 1 for every 70 people. And that’s just our electricity consumption … we use a lot more energy overall in heating and transport than we do in using electricity. The image of bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon comes to mind. Put simply, hydro energy (or urban community solar projects) will never meet more than a tiny proportion of our energy demand. It’s impossible physically.
Socially and psychologically too. Demand ratchets up thanks to our collective inability to let go of what we have. Each generation has more of something than the previous generation, which requires more resources, more energy consumption … We are very unlikely to succeed in changing the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions by telling people to have less and use less. I have tried this in the work context and most certainly failed. In my own life, I’ve tried to behave with integrity – flying rarely, not buying much clothing or other stuff, not eating red meat and so forth. My influence has been minuscule. Others with better people skills have had more influence individually, but it’s a very tall order indeed to contain our aggregate appetite for the world’s energy and resources.
There is a lot more mileage in adaptation.
Drops of water
In Elif Shafak’s recent novel There are Rivers in the Sky, the author imagines that water has memory. She imagines the eternal life of a water droplet, evaporating and rising in the sky, falling as rain somewhere else and sometime else, temporarily refreshing a plant here or a person there, acquiring memories, being marked by them.
In the real world, evaporation happens differently. Agitated H2O molecules are bumped off the water surface – like unruly pub revellers spilling out onto the street – and fly around randomly in all directions including up. Real-world atoms, like hydrogen and oxygen, are arguably akin to Shafak’s imaginery water droplets. But the real world has more dimensions. Chemistry happens: atoms rearrange themselves in different molecular guises. And as a result of radioactivity and nuclear processes, not even the atoms themselves are permanent.
And despite their (very) long life, not even atoms have memory. Within an element type (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, whatever), they are all the same. As are molecules, like water molecules and the chicken’s calcium carbonate. And that, for me, is a more profound vision of the state of the world. We are all connected, with the world and each other, by being made of the same stuff. Genetically, we are almost inseparable. And every breath we take is virtually certain to contain molecules exhaled by Henry the Eighth (or insert your historical figure of choice).
Hope
All is not lost, because intelligent life adapts to, and finds order in, whatever environment it finds itself. Order [harmony, beauty, …] is not something that is ‘out there’ and immutable, or immutably reducing. It is an interpretation of, or response to, the world by an intelligent life form.
Our human inability to let things go – always to want more – is making things hard for ourselves. It will take ingenuity to adapt to the increasingly scarred planet. Scarred from the human perspective, that is: if we fail, some other intelligent life form will succeed. With due respect to Sir David Attenborough, life on Earth will survive … Because intelligence transcends the physics of heat.