The Scourge of the Second Law

Today, I'm writing these lines from my apartment in Cyberjaya. I am usually here once a week, for a change of environment. It is the only personal space I have and all the books that I've accumulated throughout by reading life are here. Being here makes me happy because I'm surrounded by books and all the things I love.

We spend our entire lives collecting things. Lately I've come to realize that space is a very limited resource. Every item that you acquire requires some amount of space and time. You need to place it somewhere and you need to keep it free from dust and heat to preserve it. Even if you have the space to store all these memorabilia, you still need time to appreciate them. More often than not they lie forgotten in some out-of-reach shelf or stashed in some dusty box under the bed.

My policy nowadays is not to acquire things unless absolutely necessary. Reducing clutter has become a very important goal to me. Even if you can afford to buy a large apartment to keep all your material possessions, the place itself requires maintenance. Everything decays and the only thing that keeps them going is maintenance. If you own a house, you'll know how often things break and what a hassle it is to find someone to fix them.

I remember living in a hotel in Indonesia for 2 years as probably the happiest period of my life. I did not have to worry about maintaining anything. Everything I possessed came in two suitcases. But when I left, I had to ship back two large boxes of books. Accumulating books is one bad habit that I have not managed to discard.

Life requires maintenance. We spend our entire lives fighting the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which dictates that entropy has to increase. The entire universe is moving towards ever increasing disorder. Some theologians used to use this as the 'prove' that the theory of evolution is false: how can complex and organized life forms like human beings evolve from the chaos of the universe? But scientists who really understand the laws of physics know that, local pockets of organization can emerge 'briefly' from the chaos of the Big Bang. Galaxies and planetary systems look like they have been engineered by some creator God, but science can easily show that they are all natural consequences of the energy matter obeying natural physical laws.

Human intuition is limited by the very smallness of our sensory experiences in relation to the immensity of the universe. A single human lifetime is an insignificant flicker of existence. We simply have no capacity to imagine what 13.5 billion years is like. We can't even explore all the sights within our own country, let alone comprehend the vastness of the solar system, which is just a cluster of rocks around an insignificant star on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy---one of many billions of such systems in the universe.

And yet here we are, trying to make the most out of the brief existence that we have, preoccupied with petty little quarrels and concerns. 7.7 billion people squabbling and jostling for space on a tiny blue marble hurtling through empty space, succumbing, inevitably to the Second Law. Realizing this is at once humbling an exalting.