The Second Law of Thermodynamics and Me
Recently, I decided that physics is my favorite science, despite a rocky introduction to it in high school. This is because I have spent most of my life asking how things work. As a child, these questions were simple, such as "How does the bicycle stay up when it's moving but not when it's stopped?" or "Why is the ice cream in this cone melting all over my hand faster than I can eat it?" They've gotten more complicated as I've gotten older: "How do servers communicate wirelessly?" and "Why is data packet loss more noticeable when someone is reciting a specific number?" To me, and I realize that this is extremely simplistic, physics is the science of how our world works (as opposed to chemistry, which is the science of what our world is made of). One thing I remember from high school physics is that the natural inclination of the universe is to move toward disorder (or for entropy to increase). It's amazing that I remember anything at all from the class that I took 30 years ago, because my high school physics teacher, while a brilliant physicist who consulted with NASA, was an extremely terrifying woman who bullied girls and I spent a lot of time in that class wishing I could disappear.
Today I was researching a topic for an upcoming writing project and I discovered that the disorder law is actually called "The Second Law of Thermodynamics." Mary Crone summarizes it better than I could like this: "The second law of thermodynamics states that over time, systems tend to go into disordered states. If you start with many boxes of balls, some in ordered states, and other in disordered states, and shake them all around for a while, they will probably all look disordered in the end." She also says, "In this context, 'disorder,' has a specific technical definition which is often stated in terms of the temperature and energy of a system. In physics, this kind of disorder is called 'entropy.'"
This is exactly why I love physics. It has a law for something that is part of everyday life. There are numerous examples of the second law of thermodynamics in my life. I thought I'd mention just a few here, not in any specific order because there is one thing that my thoughts do and that is obey, to the letter, the descent into disorder dictated by the second law. One disclaimer: My entire house is a thermodynamics physicist's dream. Unfortunately, discussing its disorder is better reserved for a post where it is the only subject.
Cords
Despite progress in the wireless arena, most households, mine included, have probably hundreds of devices that use cords. These cords are forced into dense masses by the necessity for these cords to be plugged into power strips, modems, electrical outlets, and each other. My home office is the best example of cord disorder that I can muster. At one time, each cord was neatly attached to the back of laptops or my big computer tower with nary a tangle in sight. Even though I have no recollection of touching most of the cords since I first placed them so lovingly in their places, if you look under my desk, you'll see something that looks like spaghetti after you throw it from the pot into the colander. They are so irrevocably wrapped around each other that if I try to untangle one from the somehow roiling while stationary mass, computers beep unhappily at me like a dog whimpering in its sleep, lights flash, and monitors often go completely black. I experience something similar around the cable box, to which are attached a TV, a DVD player, a VCR, and games. These cords are something like pythons, pulling in a stray object or two--like a sock or DVD--and choking the life out of it. Sometimes I think that they're going to eat these things because they're very hard to extract.
The disorder all these cords descend to also includes wrapping themselves around the wheels of my office chair (even though my office chair is usually nowhere near them) and sometimes my feet and hands. I have to be very careful about how I remove my foot or chair wheel or an entire bank of computers or entertainment system will come crashing to the ground--the ultimate in disorder.
Objects and Pet Water Bowls
It's a fact of life that if you have pets, you must have water bowls. It's also a fact of life that if you have water bowls, objects will fall into them, even if they have a huge floor to fall into. In my house, the laundry room is also a bathroom. It's also the cat food and water headquarters. This bathroom is not small--it can hold a full-sized washer and dryer as well as a toilet, sink, and shower, as well as big shelves for storage. Yesterday, I went to extract a roll of toilet paper from on top of the washer and it rolled out of my fingers landed on the floor, took a bounce, and landed right in the cat's water bowl. Never mind that the water bowl is about 2 yards from the washer and that the toilet paper could have bounced anywhere in a 7 x 12 foot space. I shook my head and thought "There's yet another example of the second law of thermodynamics."
I also have a big water bowl in the kitchen for the two dogs that live here. I've had just about everything from the last coffee filter in the house to part of a watermelon fall from a counter or my hands right into the water bowl. In fact, I think there might be a corollary to the law that says: The greater the damage that might be caused to the object by getting wet, the more likely the object is to fall in a water bowl that can be as many as 15 feet away.
Computer Keyboards
Computer programmers must not be familiar in any way with the second law of thermodynamics. Maybe it's because they all seem to program late at night, often in the dark while listening to loud music. Or maybe it's because algorithms are very specific, with strict structure and syntax, and therefore have no basis in reality--just in servers. Therefore, they make no allowances for people with fingers that are firmly rooted toward disorder. So, they create all kinds of what they think are cool "keyboard shortcuts" and release them into the world.
The result of their work is that if you accidentally hit the "Alt" key on your computer and some random key, like the "Y" key or "F9," you'll see your document scroll quickly down to the very bottom and then disappear. Or, you'll hit some number of keys only to find that you're now typing in Cyrillic or there's no typing going on at all. In my case, I've learned about all kinds of "keyboard shortcuts" because of my clumsy fingers and the two cats that walk across the keyboard of my laptops at least twice a day. Recently, a cat walked on some keys and the writing I was doing in a project database was sent to the wrong set of recipients. Just two days ago, I hit an unknown combination of keys and all the writing I'd done in the same database vanished. There's no way to back up this work because it's a database, so here's another corollary: The more your work cannot be recovered from a keyboard shortcut, the more likely you are to hit those keys and destroy it.
Duvet Covers
I used to write about duvet covers when I worked for a home furnishings catalog, but it's only recently that I discovered how wonderful they are. For a fraction of the cost of a new comforter, I gave my old, perfectly warm but definitely faded and drab, comforter a brand new look. My comforter has now been transformed from faded wallpaper from an 1890s boudoir to a bright and colorful celebration of stripes. The duvet cover fit beautifully over the old comforter and for one day, the comforter remained flat within its new cover. However, the good ol' second law of thermodynamics made sure that it was the one and only day that the comforter lay flat. Despite the fact that the comforter is lovingly and carefully removed from my bed and folded neatly near it, I've spent the last 13 days wrestling with a duvet cover with a great big crumpled mass in the middle of it. When I undo the buttons and get one end of the comforter flattened, the other end turns into a great big version of those sausage-shaped throw pillows that you find in cushy hotel rooms. My formerly 5-minute bed making routine now takes about 25 minutes.
Shoulder pads behave similarly, as does clothing that needs to be ironed. I'll do everything in my power to try to keep them straight, but after 24 hours, the second law rears its head and the shoulder pads have become tight little coils that roll off my shoulders (I'm so glad they're going out of fashion) and the clothing will look like some 18th century laundress went through my closet and dragged the "touch up with cool iron" clothing through a wringer that doubled as a torture instrument in the Middle Ages.
My Body
My body was beautifully designed for heading into disorder. If I stretch my legs out in front of me while in my office chair, one toe will invariably land on the button of the power strip and shut off the cable modem and the desktop computer. That happened just today. There's a ton of room under my desk and the odds are small that my toe would hit that button, but hit it it did and that wasn't the first time, either. Search your memory carefully and you might remember seeing someone driving down the highway in a car with hair sticking out from between the roof of the car and sun roof. Most likely that was me--when I closed the sunroof, usually hair got stuck in it. My hair loves the second law--it winds itself around the tiny fan in my hairdryer, leaps into the flame of a lighter during the lighting of a candle, and becomes "one" with the tiny silver chain of the necklace I wear.
My feet also obey the second law. If there is a tiny dip in only one small part of a restaurant floor, my foot will find it and leave me scrambling--either up from a fall or to keep my balance. My foot will seek out hard, metal feet of beds and throw my toes at them, painfully. Not to be undone by their ambulatory cousins, my hands will smack into hard objects and my fingers will reach into a drawer and attract sharp objects like knives and straight pins--even if the drawer is huge and there's only two pins in it or the knife is face down.
Sticky Stuff
I'm convinced that sticky stuff is what inspired Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot and the gang to develop the theories that eventually would form the second law of thermodynamics. Sticky stuff is as ubiquitous as entropy itself. In my life, if sticky stuff is anywhere in the house, it will immediately plunge itself into the highest disorder by moving somewhere that it shouldn't be.
For example, syrup will dribble down from the top of a bottle onto a counter top until labels from other products adhere themselves permanently to said counter top. Or it will drip quietly to the floor and immediately become part of a foot, shoe, sock, or animal paw and become a permanent addition to several carpets, a carpeted "kitty hotel," and the floor of a car. A bottle of Elmer's glue will slowly implode in a desk drawer until no paper can be salvaged or the drawer itself won't open. A hair gel bottle will pop open in a suitcase during a flight or car trip and immediately ooze into a hairdryer that's on the other end of the suitcase so that the hairdryer is rendered completely unusable.
Mysterious, unidentifiable sticky stuff is the most insidious. It'll end up in my hair, on my office chair seat, between my toes, on the iron (where it's only discovered during the ironing process), underneath the modem for the cable phone, on booklets printed for a presentation I have to give, on my favorite CD, in between the pages of my favorite book, and on the steering wheel of my car. If I have to go somewhere in a business suit, it'll end up either on the toe of my shoe or on a place on my blouse or skirt that can't be hidden. Of course, there's a corollary and this one includes a specific factor: The higher the number of people under the age of 21 in your house, the higher the likelihood of unwanted sticky stuff landing on either valuable, important, or beloved items.
Today I was researching a topic for an upcoming writing project and I discovered that the disorder law is actually called "The Second Law of Thermodynamics." Mary Crone summarizes it better than I could like this: "The second law of thermodynamics states that over time, systems tend to go into disordered states. If you start with many boxes of balls, some in ordered states, and other in disordered states, and shake them all around for a while, they will probably all look disordered in the end." She also says, "In this context, 'disorder,' has a specific technical definition which is often stated in terms of the temperature and energy of a system. In physics, this kind of disorder is called 'entropy.'"
This is exactly why I love physics. It has a law for something that is part of everyday life. There are numerous examples of the second law of thermodynamics in my life. I thought I'd mention just a few here, not in any specific order because there is one thing that my thoughts do and that is obey, to the letter, the descent into disorder dictated by the second law. One disclaimer: My entire house is a thermodynamics physicist's dream. Unfortunately, discussing its disorder is better reserved for a post where it is the only subject.
Cords
Despite progress in the wireless arena, most households, mine included, have probably hundreds of devices that use cords. These cords are forced into dense masses by the necessity for these cords to be plugged into power strips, modems, electrical outlets, and each other. My home office is the best example of cord disorder that I can muster. At one time, each cord was neatly attached to the back of laptops or my big computer tower with nary a tangle in sight. Even though I have no recollection of touching most of the cords since I first placed them so lovingly in their places, if you look under my desk, you'll see something that looks like spaghetti after you throw it from the pot into the colander. They are so irrevocably wrapped around each other that if I try to untangle one from the somehow roiling while stationary mass, computers beep unhappily at me like a dog whimpering in its sleep, lights flash, and monitors often go completely black. I experience something similar around the cable box, to which are attached a TV, a DVD player, a VCR, and games. These cords are something like pythons, pulling in a stray object or two--like a sock or DVD--and choking the life out of it. Sometimes I think that they're going to eat these things because they're very hard to extract.
The disorder all these cords descend to also includes wrapping themselves around the wheels of my office chair (even though my office chair is usually nowhere near them) and sometimes my feet and hands. I have to be very careful about how I remove my foot or chair wheel or an entire bank of computers or entertainment system will come crashing to the ground--the ultimate in disorder.
Objects and Pet Water Bowls
It's a fact of life that if you have pets, you must have water bowls. It's also a fact of life that if you have water bowls, objects will fall into them, even if they have a huge floor to fall into. In my house, the laundry room is also a bathroom. It's also the cat food and water headquarters. This bathroom is not small--it can hold a full-sized washer and dryer as well as a toilet, sink, and shower, as well as big shelves for storage. Yesterday, I went to extract a roll of toilet paper from on top of the washer and it rolled out of my fingers landed on the floor, took a bounce, and landed right in the cat's water bowl. Never mind that the water bowl is about 2 yards from the washer and that the toilet paper could have bounced anywhere in a 7 x 12 foot space. I shook my head and thought "There's yet another example of the second law of thermodynamics."
I also have a big water bowl in the kitchen for the two dogs that live here. I've had just about everything from the last coffee filter in the house to part of a watermelon fall from a counter or my hands right into the water bowl. In fact, I think there might be a corollary to the law that says: The greater the damage that might be caused to the object by getting wet, the more likely the object is to fall in a water bowl that can be as many as 15 feet away.
Computer Keyboards
Computer programmers must not be familiar in any way with the second law of thermodynamics. Maybe it's because they all seem to program late at night, often in the dark while listening to loud music. Or maybe it's because algorithms are very specific, with strict structure and syntax, and therefore have no basis in reality--just in servers. Therefore, they make no allowances for people with fingers that are firmly rooted toward disorder. So, they create all kinds of what they think are cool "keyboard shortcuts" and release them into the world.
The result of their work is that if you accidentally hit the "Alt" key on your computer and some random key, like the "Y" key or "F9," you'll see your document scroll quickly down to the very bottom and then disappear. Or, you'll hit some number of keys only to find that you're now typing in Cyrillic or there's no typing going on at all. In my case, I've learned about all kinds of "keyboard shortcuts" because of my clumsy fingers and the two cats that walk across the keyboard of my laptops at least twice a day. Recently, a cat walked on some keys and the writing I was doing in a project database was sent to the wrong set of recipients. Just two days ago, I hit an unknown combination of keys and all the writing I'd done in the same database vanished. There's no way to back up this work because it's a database, so here's another corollary: The more your work cannot be recovered from a keyboard shortcut, the more likely you are to hit those keys and destroy it.
Duvet Covers
I used to write about duvet covers when I worked for a home furnishings catalog, but it's only recently that I discovered how wonderful they are. For a fraction of the cost of a new comforter, I gave my old, perfectly warm but definitely faded and drab, comforter a brand new look. My comforter has now been transformed from faded wallpaper from an 1890s boudoir to a bright and colorful celebration of stripes. The duvet cover fit beautifully over the old comforter and for one day, the comforter remained flat within its new cover. However, the good ol' second law of thermodynamics made sure that it was the one and only day that the comforter lay flat. Despite the fact that the comforter is lovingly and carefully removed from my bed and folded neatly near it, I've spent the last 13 days wrestling with a duvet cover with a great big crumpled mass in the middle of it. When I undo the buttons and get one end of the comforter flattened, the other end turns into a great big version of those sausage-shaped throw pillows that you find in cushy hotel rooms. My formerly 5-minute bed making routine now takes about 25 minutes.
Shoulder pads behave similarly, as does clothing that needs to be ironed. I'll do everything in my power to try to keep them straight, but after 24 hours, the second law rears its head and the shoulder pads have become tight little coils that roll off my shoulders (I'm so glad they're going out of fashion) and the clothing will look like some 18th century laundress went through my closet and dragged the "touch up with cool iron" clothing through a wringer that doubled as a torture instrument in the Middle Ages.
My Body
My body was beautifully designed for heading into disorder. If I stretch my legs out in front of me while in my office chair, one toe will invariably land on the button of the power strip and shut off the cable modem and the desktop computer. That happened just today. There's a ton of room under my desk and the odds are small that my toe would hit that button, but hit it it did and that wasn't the first time, either. Search your memory carefully and you might remember seeing someone driving down the highway in a car with hair sticking out from between the roof of the car and sun roof. Most likely that was me--when I closed the sunroof, usually hair got stuck in it. My hair loves the second law--it winds itself around the tiny fan in my hairdryer, leaps into the flame of a lighter during the lighting of a candle, and becomes "one" with the tiny silver chain of the necklace I wear.
My feet also obey the second law. If there is a tiny dip in only one small part of a restaurant floor, my foot will find it and leave me scrambling--either up from a fall or to keep my balance. My foot will seek out hard, metal feet of beds and throw my toes at them, painfully. Not to be undone by their ambulatory cousins, my hands will smack into hard objects and my fingers will reach into a drawer and attract sharp objects like knives and straight pins--even if the drawer is huge and there's only two pins in it or the knife is face down.
Sticky Stuff
I'm convinced that sticky stuff is what inspired Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot and the gang to develop the theories that eventually would form the second law of thermodynamics. Sticky stuff is as ubiquitous as entropy itself. In my life, if sticky stuff is anywhere in the house, it will immediately plunge itself into the highest disorder by moving somewhere that it shouldn't be.
For example, syrup will dribble down from the top of a bottle onto a counter top until labels from other products adhere themselves permanently to said counter top. Or it will drip quietly to the floor and immediately become part of a foot, shoe, sock, or animal paw and become a permanent addition to several carpets, a carpeted "kitty hotel," and the floor of a car. A bottle of Elmer's glue will slowly implode in a desk drawer until no paper can be salvaged or the drawer itself won't open. A hair gel bottle will pop open in a suitcase during a flight or car trip and immediately ooze into a hairdryer that's on the other end of the suitcase so that the hairdryer is rendered completely unusable.
Mysterious, unidentifiable sticky stuff is the most insidious. It'll end up in my hair, on my office chair seat, between my toes, on the iron (where it's only discovered during the ironing process), underneath the modem for the cable phone, on booklets printed for a presentation I have to give, on my favorite CD, in between the pages of my favorite book, and on the steering wheel of my car. If I have to go somewhere in a business suit, it'll end up either on the toe of my shoe or on a place on my blouse or skirt that can't be hidden. Of course, there's a corollary and this one includes a specific factor: The higher the number of people under the age of 21 in your house, the higher the likelihood of unwanted sticky stuff landing on either valuable, important, or beloved items.
posted by Froshty | 6:08 AM
7 Comments:
Froshty, you have caused the patrons of the library to come to the conclusion that the reference desk attendent (that's me) is a tittering, giggling psycho. This is SO funny. I'm providing a link, everyone must read this.
I identify with everything you wrote about but especially the water bowl. My water bowl caused me to burn a grilled cheese sandwich yesterday. As I was making it, Booker was looking at me longingly and I realized that I hadn't fed him. So I flipped the snadwich which gave me just enough time to put some food in his bowl. But then I noticed that a pair of underwear had fallin off the dryer into his water bowl. I wanted to get it the dryer without having water drip all over the floor and it took me a while to figure out how to do this. By the time I got back to the grilled cheese, it was burnt. So the theory is true. And then, later I found a pair of shorts had fallen into the bowl. And then, a shirt. That might have neen the kitties that did that. Culpepper has taken to sleeping on the unfolded pile of clothes.
I loved this line:
"My comforter has now been transformed from faded wallpaper from an 1890s boudoir to a bright and colorful celebration of stripes."
Ian, you probably brightened up what might have been a dreary day for the patrons. I've had laundry fall into the water bowl, too, so I can sympathize completely with what happened to you and the grilled cheese sandwich. There's a corollary to the law in your story--"One descent into disorder can have a domino effect, dragging unrelated factors into the irrevocable march toward complete chaos." Thanks for the compliment on the line--I struggled a bit with the description of the current state of the comfort now that it has a duvet cover before I got the right words for it.
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Ohmigod, sticky stuff, yes! Especially that horrible, unidentifiable sticky stuff that turns my two strands of hair into one. Your description of the duvet cover is priceless. I'd like to add to this the notion of the average handbag being the most perfect outlet for the second law of thermodynamics. No matter how many carefully-designed, zippered-and-snapped compartments any given handbag might contain, mysterious sticky stuff galore will ooze itself inside. This sticky stuff along with lipstick caps that fly off their tubes, near-impossible-to-open pill bottles that fling themselves open tossing about pills to melt into the cloth lining, along with any form of candy or mint that finds its way into the bag, and of course, pens that begin leaking the minute they enter this environment will all mangle together with the cell phone, sunglasses, and keys (doing their best to make these things useless), in one big lump at the bottom of the bag.
Emily, I can't believe I forgot about the handbag. Every bag I've had has been a poster child for the second law. Each also took on another physics phenomenon--the black hole. Only in the case of the bags, the black hole spits back the lost item hours after I no longer need it and am looking for something else.
Our water bowl collects dog food, hair, and insects when things are not falling into it. The comforter does this weird impression of trying desperately to burst out one end of the cover and retreat stubbornly from the other end. My handbag has a special trigger that makes everything next to the thing I'm trying to retrieve fly out at the same time. Something similar happens when I try to get one article of clothing out of the closet: either four more come with it or several hangers get hooked together and fall down bringing more clothes with them. And whatever the sticky stuff is, it's permanently sticky; i.e. it never dries up. I'm thinking of renaming our house Entropy Cottage.
This is great info to know.
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