The Inevitability of Entropy
11 Mar 2025home > blogs
What is Entropy?
Entropy is a measure of disorder or randomness within a system
Go to any beach, there would be kids building sand castles. You would see a beautiful castle made of sand, and the rest of the beach has loose sand. Which has more order?. Loose sand or the sand castle?. Of course, the sand castle.
We can say that
- The sandcastle has low entropy because the sand particles are arranged in a structured, orderly way.
- The loose sand has high entropy because its particles are randomly distributed with no defined structure.
Yeah, this is another word, the physicists should have defined right. The inverse nature of this word makes it difficult to understand the concept of entropy. Let’s continue.
Let’s say, nobody goes to the beach for the next 100 years. What do you think will probably happen?. Sand castle becoming loose sand (or) the loose sand becoming a sand castle?. Of course the former.
We could also generalize that, everything in this universe tends to move towards high entropy almost all the time. (i.e.) Order to Chaos.
Order to Chaos is the natural order!
What are Entropy Systems?
Let’s take an apple, clean it thoroughly (no bacteria or any other life forms), and keep it in a transparent vacuum box (no air). What do you think will happen to the apple?. It will stay the same for a really long time. If the vacuum box is intact, even for millions of years. We can call this a low-entropy system because the order is maintained.
Let’s take the same apple and give it to a man. He will eat the apple, digest it, transform into energy to be used by the body and discard the rest as bodily waste. Here, the apple is converted to energy and waste, and loses its form very quickly. We can call this a high-entropy system, because the order is lost quickly.
Now, we understand the concepts of Entropy and the Entropy Systems. Let’s look around us and see where these concepts are being expressed.
Entropy in Earth
Our Earth receives energy from the Sun continuously in the form of light and heat (photons). Roughly 174 petawatts of energy every second, which could power the whole world for over an hour.
Have you ever wondered what happens to that much energy from the sun?. About 30% is reflected back to space and 70% is absorbed by the atmosphere, land, and oceans.
A large portion of the energy from the sun, are used by the plants along with nutrients from the soil and carbon from the atmosphere to grow (photosynthesis), the herbivores eat the plants, the carnivores eat the herbivores, and when the animals and plants die, they decompose and return as nutrients to the soil. The plants use nutrients from the soil, carbon from the air, and energy from the sun to grow again. The cycle continues.
Life forms on earth are effective at absorbing and dissipating energy from the sun. (i.e.) absorbing concentrated high energy photos and dissipating weak radiations out to space. In other words, order to disorder.
We can say, lifeforms on earth are a high entropy system. To understand the impact of life forms, let’s consider this question,
What if Earth had no life?
Literally no plants, animals, fishes, microbes. Nothing. No life form that can use the energy from the sun.
All those energy from the sun, would heat up the earth slowly, with no plants to absorb CO2, the earth’s temperature would become warmer and warmer, heating the planet at an accelerated rate, resulting in loss of oceans, reduction in tectonic plate movements, slowly losing the atmosphere - in a few million years, the planet would be completely dry and in a few billion years, our cool blue planet Earth could look like Mars.
How fascinating is this theory? In a sense, we could say
It’s not the Earth that sustains life. It’s Life that sustains Earth.
What a wonderful realization!
Entropy in the Universe
Let’s stick to the Big Bang theory. In the beginning of the universe, all the matter was condensed, evenly distributed, and at a uniform high temperature. (i.e.) There is high level of orderliness and thus a low entropy.
Since then, the universe is expanding continuously, forming stars, solar systems, galaxies, black holes, and many anomalies - thus slowly increasing its entropy.
The final stages of the universe would be a place where every single atom or molecule are so apart from each other that they cease to interact and there is no temperature difference in the universe, leading to the “heat death”. (i.e.) There is no order, only random distribution of fundamental particles and thus a maximum entropy.
All of these are inevitable, whether you believe in god or not, everything that we’ve ever known will cease to lose its form, and exist only as fundamental particles, far away from each other in a cold, dark, lifeless universe.
The good thing is - it may take a googol years for that to happen. So, no need to worry about it now.
If you noticed,
- Everything in the universe moves towards maximum entropy.
- Life forms accelerate entropy.
So, in the process of the universe moving towards maximum entropy, it’s highly probable that life forms emerge as one of the high entropy systems. Infact, a MIT Physicist has a bold claim.
You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant - Jeremy England
Yeah, it’s exaggerated. I understand. I also know you would have many questions at this point. That’s a separate article on thermodynamics to answer them (coming soon).
For now, when you combine the idea of life form as high entropy system, with the fact that there are trillions of stars, solar systems, and planets, I can’t help but think,
It is statistically improbable that Earth is the only planet with life. There must exist billions of other planets with life throughout the universe.
Those life form’s entropy could be high or low compared to humans. Those civilizations with very high entropy have a high probability of becoming intergalactic species (another article).
Ok. Enough of Physics. Let’s switch context.
Entropy in Social Systems
Let’s take a couple of social systems and view them through the lens of entropy.
Communism
Communism imposes order through centralized control of production and consumption of goods and services, and equal wealth distribution to eliminate social / economic / class inequalities, so that everyone would be living harmoniously with each other.
The drawback here is the order. Communism envisions a perpetual low entropy social system, which is against the very nature of the universe, eventually leading to the demise or reformation to another social system.
Capitalism
Capitalism thrives on free-market competition and decentralized control which aims for progress and innovation, and does not care about social / economic / class inequalities.
Though capitalism starts as a high entropy social system, eventually the wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, thus creating low entropy, which is against nature and the system collapses and then restarts. So, cycles of prosperity and cycles of destruction are inevitable in a capitalistic society.
I am not here to advise which social system is best for humans. I am merely pointing out that you can also view social systems through the context of entropy. Instead of rejecting the idea of entropy, embrace it and figure out how to control the degree of disorder.
What do you think of Entropy?. Where else could you apply this entropy lens?. Philosophy?. Let me know if you find interesting viewpoints.