Entropy

Lately I've had entropy on my mind. The heat death of the universe. What brought this up most recently was another long commute from home to the office. The Washington Metro has been much in the news locally for its increasing inefficiency and mechanical failures. I now expect some sort of problem at least once a week, and usually more often when the weather is either very warm or very cold. I'm not sure whether it is actually the weather that affects the service or a combination of the extremes of weather and a sudden growth in ridership that taxes an already weakened system. Where entropy comes into this has to do with my own reaction to the situation. I just tell myself that this is the natural order of things. Systems run down. Disorder takes its toll. Everything goes from bad to worse.

Now having had this thought about the Metro, I begin to ponder the larger context, and I find that I am strangely comforted by the notion that everything runs down eventually. Nothing endures. The ancients were aware of this, an obvious fact to anyone who looks around and observes life in any of its manifestations. Things begin and they end. We are born, we live, and we die. That pretty much says it all, but it's a hard lesson to learn. We seem to demand that there be more to it. On the one hand, we want things to get better not worse, and we look for evidence to back up that notion. Thus we have this idea of progress. We are obviously better off now than we were in the past. We can select many examples as proof of this proposition. Just look at computers. They are smaller and faster and cheaper than they were last year or even last month. Doesn't that prove that not everything is running down?

Then I think to myself, not so fast. Sure computers are getting smaller, faster, and cheaper. They are improving in speed and storage capacity, but at the same time they are requiring more and more in the way of overhead. Software is taking more space and requiring more computing capacity. Operating systems are growing in complexity and size. Viruses are proliferating. Spam is clogging up email. And programs are running in the background monitoring everything, guarding our security and watching for certain kinds of activity, signs of distress. The overhead is growing as fast as or faster than the computers themselves. And isn't that also a cause of entropy? As the systems grow in size and complexity to keep pace with the growth of viruses, spam, and the greater demands of software, the efficiency of the systems deteriorates, disorder proliferates and things begin to show signs of strain.

And so it seems to be with all systems, from the Washington Metro to our own stressed bodies and brains. As they cope with growing complexity and the strains of added capacity, they begin to show the unmistakable signs of wear and tear, so that what once was orderly and efficient becomes disorderly and undependable. And why is it that I find this strangely comforting?