Entropy
SHETLAND WAR RUINS PROJECT
In reading as part of dissertation research, the idea of entropy has often emerged for example in the artist Cyprien Gaillard’s vandalistic practise which he describes as an acceleration of decay. For influencial artist of the 1960s and 70s Robert Smithson, entropy was a key concept in his art. I found out more about this notion of a state of absolute chaos:
The arrow of time: Things never run in reverse. We ourselves have a natural intuitive sense of order . The arrow of time dictates that things move continually forward. The universe may seem to us eternal and fixed but it is also changing continuously and irreversibly.
Stages in the life of the universe:
Primordial - high energy particles move around at high speed.
Age of the Stars, Stelliferous - enough calmness for gravity to take hole and stars and planets to form.
Age of Decay - the vast majority of the life of the universe, a slow progression towards absolute decay and chaos.
Entropy in Physics: Defined as a way of re-arranging things, a measure of order. Some things have high entropy, for example a pile of sand - there are many ways of rearranging the particles whilst still keeping the recognisable structure. Structures that are highly ordered have low entropy. Entropy increases over time because it is overwhelmingly more likely that it will - chaos is more likely than order.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics: Key in understanding the passage of time. This law states that everything tends from order to disorder, and so therefore there is a difference between past and the future. The universe was more ordered in the past and will become less ordered in the future. There’s a distinct direction to the passage of time.
Our own sun will decay: As it does, it will expand, heating the Earth, before shrinking to a dim white dwarf star. There will be one last perfect day on Earth before life becomes impossible, our complex systems of life reduced to chaos and destruction.
The universe cannot last forever: The Age of the Stars will come to an end, one by one they will decay to Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Black Holes and Black Dwarfs. Black Dwarfs will be the last stars, the last embers which will eventually evaporate into the void as radiation, leaving not a single atom. After an unimaginable length of time, only photons will be left, slowly cooling towards absolute zero.
For the first time, the universe will be permanent and unchanging - it cannot get any more disordered. Nothing happens and it continues to not happen for ever. In this state, there’s no way to differentiate between past and present. The arrow of time has ceased to exist.
There’s no other way for life to form and exist than this, life needs time to form. Now is the narrow window for life to form.
To see the world and the universe in this way, with nothing fixed and eternal, but everything in a state of progression towards decay, is very strange. We as ‘ordered’, advanced, evolved, conscious beings seem to aspire for perfection, spiritual and abstract states of order. Through our ‘advances’ in science, technology and knowledge we strive to understand the world around. But we’re also tied to physical inevitabilities of decay and chaos. Again I was reminded of William Blake’s illustration for ‘Night Thoughts’ in which the figure is torn between the two states of being, striving for the abstract above yet chained to the earth.