The Heat Death of My Bedroom

                                                         The Heat Death of My Bedroom

By Saoirse Mooney

 “We're all hurtling towards death. Yet here we are, for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we're going to die. Each of us secretly believing we won't.”

― Charlie Kaufman

In my junior year of high school, I had the choice of taking physics or chemistry. Obviously I chose physics: it seemed like it had all the answers, the real answers to those questions I often wondered about the universe. And it certainly didn’t help that the chemistry teacher had a reputation for throwing dry erase markers at students. Ultimately, the physical class progressed as a physics class would. We didn’t get to much discussion on the multiverse or aliens, (I did, however,  become a pro at drawing free body diagrams), but I found that after our unit on thermodynamics, I was being haunted. There were ghosts everywhere.

Thermodynamics is, roughly, the study of heat, work, and energy in different systems. The first example my teacher gave was the temperature regulation in your home. If it’s cold outside, or there just so happens to be a polar vortex sweeping through, to warm your home, you need energy to be put in to produce warmth. To contain that warmth and hopefully lower your bills, you would want your home to be sufficiently insulated to prevent its escape. Yet, no matter how efficient your heater is, not all the work it does goes to warming your home. Some of that energy is lost. Or, in the jargon of a the Encyclopedia Britannica, the second law of thermodynamics, which predicts this loss, is defined as, “a cyclic transformation whose only final result is to transform heat extracted from a source which is at the same temperature throughout into work is impossible.” Now, before you aptly respond with the law of conservation of energy (just as my peers did in class), it’s not exactly lost, just unusable. No system can be 100% efficient, and as a result, in every action you take, small amounts of energy are being lost as a result of entropy.

Entropy is somewhat a nebulous concept. Rigorously, it does not have a clear definition, but roughly, it can be thought of the amount of disorder, or chaos, in the universe, as a result of the second law of thermodynamics. John von Veumann, the mathematician who basically wrote the book on quantum mechanics argued, “Whoever uses the term 'entropy' in a discussion always wins since no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate one always has the advantage." Yet, entropy has been at the heart of many questions in physics, as it described the tendency to move from order to disorder. 

I began seeing the effects of entropy in my life. My bedroom always seems destined for chaos, and every week I find myself cleaning everything once again. Yet, the dust builds up even still. So much of life began to feel Sisyphean, as I was just fighting, each time less successfully, the tendency of disorder. Even maintaining friendships felt like a task, each relationship a thermal system that required constant upkeep at a reward that would be no greater than what I put in since energy is always being lost around us. Not truly lost, but it becomes ghostly.

The Lord Kelvin, whose contribution to physics made him worthy of the name, first postulated in the 1850s that the universe would end by entropy.  Thinking of the universe as a thermal system, it was easy to extrapolate from the small scale losses he saw in nature to the entire universe itself. In fact, he used this idea to disprove an infinitely old universe: if left alone for an infinitely long time, all systems will reach a thermal “equilibrium,” where everything would become the same temperature and heat dissipated through the universe. After Lord Kelvin, came the big bang theory, and the subsequent discovery that our universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. From this emerges a more modern version of heat death, whereby the universe will just grow and grow, and as entropy inevitably rises, the universe will expand into somewhat of a barren wasteland. This, some will note, requires our speculation about the shape of the universe as something flat and open, but even if it was not this shape, it would still be victim to Kelvin’s original theory on heat death as it would eventually reach thermal equilibrium, still equally deadly, just in a more contained shape.

Chaos is inevitable, and we only have so much energy to put in before it runs out and dissipates. It scared me to think that the universe would just become this chamber of ghosts in purgatory. I mean, it still does, but I’ve reached more of an equilibrium with this idea as my initial fear was slowly lost. Fear takes a lot of work, and, if I only have so much energy to spend, I might as well put it to use making the universe a better place while it has the chance.