so, I’ve taken up tailoring recently. and while I was working on a draping today, I got to thinking about entropy.
(drapings are those things where a tailor takes a blank section of cloth and sculpts a piece of clothing directly onto a model’s body. it ensures a perfect fit. entropy refers to the level of organization in a system. the less organization a system has, the greater its entropy. entropy can only be overcome with energy. it takes effort to organize a system. the natural state of the universe is one of complete entropy, i.e., the lowest energy state possible.)
A piece of broadcloth, before it’s used for a draping, is the cloth in its state of greatest entropy. it’s featureless. uniform. whatever small variations exist between one part of the cloth and another are random and will ease out over time. wrinkles. chalk markings. small snags.
a finished piece of clothing is the cloth at its lowest state of entropy, and by extension, its highest energy state. it is structured and organized. it has many features, all of which interact with each other in a coherent system. seams and darts and buttons and lining all cooperate to give the dress, or whatever it is, a fixed shape and function.
most things are like this. your body. the planet Earth. the Milky Way. they are systems made of organized parts which give them form and function.
(the difference between you and a few buckets of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and a few other atoms combined into an inert slurry is the entropy of the system.)
but in order for those systems to become organized, they needed energy from an outside source. without energy, everything slides towards entropy. the energy that makes your body possible comes from the food you eat. the energy from your food comes, though a few middlemen like cows or cabbages or whatever, from the Sun. the Sun’s energy comes from the fusion of hydrogen into helium. A hydrogen atom is just a proton: maybe paired with an electron, if it bumps into one. And those component particles were created in the first few wild moments after the Big Bang.
All of the energy in the universe can be traced back to the Big Bang. every organized system owes its life to the Big Bang. we’re just sipping from its cup until we die.
(where did the energy that ignited the Big Bang come from? no one knows. there’s room to see God there, if you’re so inclined.)
but the energy of the Big Bang wasn’t infinite. we are, slowly, using it up. the universe is sinking to a lower and lower energy state, all the time. according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the energy of a system can only stay the same or decrease. entropy will win. people refer to this as the heat death of the universe. according to current science, it’s the most likely end point for everything.
so anyway, I got to thinking about this while I was tailoring today.
I spent all day on this project. I put a lot of energy into it. my energy, as mechanical energy, or the physical act of sewing, into the cloth, where it’s now stored as potential energy, which is the energy of positioning. I turned chemical energy (food) into motion and then into shape. each of these transitions is a step down the ladder. a little bit more of our universe’s inheritance, spent.
and I got really sad. that probably sounds ridiculous, right? but I think about this a lot. every time I spend energy, that’s energy the universe can’t get back. a sequin off the Big Bang is now a new dress on my ironing board. was that energy well-spent? should it have gone to something else? it doesn’t matter. it’s gone now. the universe is a little bit closer to death.
then I stopped being sad, and I just felt a deep responsibility to take care of that dress. because, mathematically speaking, there’s nothing superior about organization over entropy. the particles don’t care if they’re in a high or low energy state. your atoms don’t know who you are, and it doesn’t matter to them if you’re you, or a few buckets of slurry. the value of organization is subjective. systems are important because we believe they are. the universe’s life and death only matter if they matter to us.
I like tailoring. my new dress came out well. I’m looking forward to making another one. I’m sorry that someday there won’t be any more new dresses, or anything else.
maybe that’s good enough.