Entropy, a measure of disorder, explains why life always seems to get more, not less, complicated as time goes on.
The Order of Disorder
The second law of thermodynamics states that “as one goes forward in time, the net entropy (degree of disorder) of any isolated or closed system will always increase (or at least stay the same).”[1]
Entropy is a measure of disorder and affects all aspects of our daily lives. You can think of it as nature’s tax.[2]
Entropy naturally increases over time. Problems arise: your house gets messy, your garden gets weeds, and the heat from your coffee spreads out. Businesses fail, crimes and revolutions occur, and relationships end. In the long run, everything naturally decays, and disorder always increases.
Disorder is not a mistake; it is the default. Order is always artificial and temporary.
Discovery of Entropy
The identification of entropy is attributed to Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888), a German mathematician and physicist.
Clausius studied the conversion of heat into work. He recognized that heat from a body at a high temperature would flow to one at a lower temperature. This is how your coffee cools down the longer it’s left out — the heat from the coffee flows into the room. This happens naturally. But if you want to heat cold water to make the coffee, you need to do work — you need a power source to heat the water.
From this idea comes Clausius’s statement of the second law of thermodynamics: “Heat does not pass from a body at low temperature to one at high temperature without an accompanying change elsewhere.”
Clausius also observed something curious: Only a percentage of energy is converted into actual work. Nature was exerting a tax.
Perplexed, scientists asked, where did the rest of the heat go and why?
Clausius solved the riddle by observing a steam engine and calculating that energy spread out and left the system. In The Mechanical Theory of Heat, Clausius explains his findings:
… the quantities of heat which must be imparted to, or withdrawn from a changeable body are not the same, when these changes occur in a non-reversible manner, as they are when the same changes occur reversibly. In the second place, with each non-reversible change is associated an uncompensated transformation…
… I propose to call the magnitude S the entropy of the body… I have intentionally formed the word entropy so as to be as similar as possible to the word energy….
The second fundamental theorem [the second law of thermodynamics], in the form which I have given to it, asserts that all transformations occurring in nature may take place in a certain direction, which I have assumed as positive, by themselves, that is, without compensation… [T]he entire condition of the universe must always continue to change in that first direction, and the universe must consequently approach incessantly a limiting condition.
… For every body two magnitudes have thereby presented themselves—the transformation value of its thermal content [the amount of inputted energy that is converted to “work”], and its disgregation [separation or disintegration]; the sum of which constitutes its entropy.
Clausius summarized the concept of entropy in simple terms: “The energy of the universe is constant. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”
Entropy and Time
Entropy is one of the few concepts that provide evidence for the existence of time. The “Arrow of Time” is a name given to the idea that time is asymmetrical and flows in only one direction: forward. It is a non-reversible process wherein entropy increases.
Astronomer Arthur Eddington pioneered the concept of the Arrow of Time in 1927, writing:
Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow[,] we find more and more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases[,] the arrow points towards the past. That is the only distinction known to physics.
In a segment of Wonders of the Universe, produced for BBC Two, physicist Brian Cox explains:
The Arrow of Time dictates that as each moment passes, things change, and once these changes have happened, they are never undone. Permanent change is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. We all age as the years pass by — people are born, they live, and they die. I suppose it’s part of the joy and tragedy of our lives, but out there in the universe, those grand and epic cycles appear eternal and unchanging. But that’s an illusion. See, in the life of the universe, just as in our lives, everything is irreversibly changing.
In his play Arcadia, Tom Stoppard uses a novel metaphor for the non-reversible nature of entropy:
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
Entropy in Business and Economics
Entropy is fundamentally a probabilistic idea: For every possible “usefully ordered” state of molecules, there are many more possible “disordered” states.
Just as energy tends towards a less useful, more disordered state, so do businesses and organizations. Rearranging the molecules — or business systems and people — into an “ordered” state requires constant energy expenditure.
Let’s imagine that we start a company by sticking 20 people in an office with an ill-defined but ambitious goal and no further leadership. We tell them we’ll pay them as long as they’re there, working. We come back two months later to find that five have quit, five are sleeping with each other, and the other ten have no idea how to solve the litany of problems that have arisen. The employees are certainly not much closer to the goal laid out for them. Left to its own devices, the whole enterprise falls apart.
In physics, entropy is a law; in social systems, it’s a mere tendency — though a strong one, to be sure.
Entropy occurs in every aspect of a business. Employees may forget training, lose enthusiasm, cut corners, and ignore rules. Equipment may break down, become inefficient, or be subject to improper use. Products may become outdated or be in less demand. Even the best of intentions cannot prevent an entropic slide towards chaos.
Successful businesses invest time and money to minimize entropy. For example, they provide regular staff training, good reporting of issues, inspections, detailed files, and monitoring reports of successes and failures. They ruthlessly seek out and eliminate the sediment of bureaucracy. Anything less will mean almost inevitable problems and loss of potential revenue. Without the necessary effort, a business expands into bankruptcy.
Entropy sows the seeds of destruction.
Fortunately, unlike thermodynamic systems, a business can reverse the impact of entropy. A balance must be struck between creativity and control, though. Too little autonomy for employees results in disinterest, while too much leads to poor decisions.
Entropy in Everyday Life
We have all observed entropy in our everyday lives. Everything tends towards disorder. Life always seems to get more complicated. Once-tidy rooms become cluttered and dusty. Strong relationships grow fractured and end. We grow old. Complex skills are forgotten. Buildings degrade as brickwork cracks, paint chips, and tiles loosen.
Disorder is not a mistake; it is the default. Order is always artificial and temporary.
Just because entropy is the natural tendency of things, that doesn’t mean you can’t fight back. You can clean a messy house, pull weeds out of the garden, and practice your skills. You can maintain your relationship, go to the gym, and even put up a fresh coat of paint.
Combatting entropy requires energy. When you clean a messy house, you use energy to return the house to a previous, simpler, tidier state. This is why entropy is nature’s tax. You need to expend energy just to maintain the current state. Failing to pay nature’s tax means things get more complicated, disorganized, and messier.
We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. To maintain our health, relationships, careers, skills, knowledge, societies, and possessions requires never-ending effort and vigilance.
Now you understand why one of the hardest things in life is keeping it simple.
Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary.
Does that seem sad or pointless? It’s not. Imagine a world with no entropy — everything stays the way we leave it, no one ages or gets ill, nothing breaks or fails, everything remains pristine. Arguably, that would also be a world without innovation, creativity, urgency, or need for progress.
In The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick writes,
Organisms organize. … We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order… We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit … Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells, and carapaces, leaves, and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways—miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.
The question is not whether we can prevent entropy (we can’t) but how we can curb, control, work with, and understand it. Entropy is all around us.
The tiny individual decisions we make (or don’t make) to combat entropy in our daily lives create massively different results. Consider focus. The number of projects we are involved in only seems to grow. Those of us who expend energy to maintain focus on only one or two get a lot more done than those who naturally let things expand. Focus requires effort.
Using Entropy to Gain an Advantage
Whether you’re starting a business or trying to change your organization, understanding the abstraction of entropy as a mental model will help you accomplish your goals more effectively. Because things naturally move to disorder over time, we can position ourselves to create stability.
There are two types of stability: active and passive. Consider a ship, which, if designed well, should be able to sail through a storm without intervention. This is passive stability. A fighter jet, in contrast, requires active stability. The plane can’t fly for more than a few seconds without having to adjust its wings. This adjustment happens so fast that it’s controlled by software. There is no inherent stability here: if you cut the power, the plane crashes.[3]
People get in trouble when they confuse the two types of stability.
Relationships, for example, require attention and care. If you assume your relationship is passively stable, you’ll wake up one day to divorce papers. Your house is also not passively stable. If not cleaned regularly, it will continue to get messier and messier.
Organizations require stability, as well. If you’re a company that relies on debt, you’re not passively stable but actively stable. Factoring in a margin of safety, this means that the people giving you the credit should be passively stable. If you’re both actively stable, then when the power gets cut, you’re likely to be in a position of weakness, not strength.
With active stability, you’re applying energy to a system to bring about some advantage (keeping the plane from crashing, your relationship going, the house clean, etc.), If we move a little further down the rabbit hole, we can see how applying the same amount of energy can yield totally different results.
Let’s use the analogy of coughing.[4] Coughing is the transfer of energy as heat. If you cough in a quiet coffee shop, which you can think of as a system with low entropy, you cause a big change. Your cough is disruptive. On the other hand, if you cough in Times Square, a system with a lot of entropy, that same cough will have no impact. While you change the entropy in both cases, the impact you have with the same cough is proportional to the existing entropy.
Now think of this example in relation to your organization. You’re applying energy to get something done. The higher the entropy in the system, the less efficient the energy you apply will be. The same person applying 20 units of energy in a big bureaucracy is going to see less impact than someone applying the same 20 units in a small startup.
You can think about this idea in a competitive sense, too. If you’re starting a business and you’re competing against very effective and efficient people, a lot of effort will get absorbed. It’s not going to be very efficient. If, on the other hand, you compete against less efficient and effective people, the same amount of energy will be more efficient in its conversion.
For a change to occur, you must apply more energy to the system than is extracted by the system.
Resources:
[1] http://www.exactlywhatistime.com/physics-of-time/the-arrow-of-time/
[2] Peter Atkins
[3] Based on the work of Tom Tombrello
[4] Derived from the work of Peter Atkins in The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction