We are all pursuing high emotional intelligence, so why do we insist on low entropy in life?

The famous physicist Schrödinger once said in his book What is Life, "People live to fight against the law of increasing entropy, and life survives on negative entropy."

Wu Guosheng, a professor at the Department of History of Science at Tsinghua University, once said that if only one law could be kept in physics, I would keep the law of increasing entropy.

Even Einstein , the founder of modern physics, believed that the "law of increasing entropy" was the most powerful scientific law.

What is this strange law of "entropy increase" that has fascinated countless scientists? Why do we pursue low entropy in life ? Today, let's talk about "entropy" with you.

Schrödinger diagram source: Wikipedia

The concept of entropy was proposed by German physicist Clausius in 1865. It means "inner" in Greek, that is, "the change in the intrinsic properties of a system" and is generally recorded as S in the formula.

Entropy represents the degree of disorder of the system. The more orderly the system is, the smaller the entropy value is; the more disordered the system is, the larger the entropy value is.

From the law of conservation of energy we know that the total amount of energy is constant, but the possible quantity cannot be converted 100%, and the lost energy is entropy.

The law of increasing entropy, as a form of expression of the second law of thermodynamics, holds that in an isolated system that is not affected by the outside world, energy can only be transformed in one direction, that is, from usable to unusable, from effective to ineffective, and from ordered to disordered.

Still feeling confused?

For example, suppose you have a glass of ice water and a glass of room temperature water in front of you. Which one do you think is more chaotic? I believe most people would say ice water, but in fact water is more chaotic. We all know that water and ice are both made of water molecules, but the difference is that the distances between water molecules are different.

Ice has a tetrahedral crystal structure, which is formed by hydrogen bonds. The distance between water molecules in the crystal is small and the arrangement is regular and orderly. The formation of liquid water breaks up a large number of hydrogen bonds, making the arrangement between molecules disordered, so the entropy changes greatly and the degree of disorder increases.

In addition, similar entropy increase phenomena are also common in daily life. For example, shoelaces will become loose, mobile phones will become slower and slower as you use them, and the neatly made sheets at home will become messy after sleeping, etc. These are all entropy increase phenomena.

Parents must have felt deeply that if children play with toys without restraint, they will definitely turn the house upside down and have no place to go. When we regard a toy as an element and all toys as a system, the system changes from being neat to chaotic. At this time, it becomes very difficult to find a favorite toy because it may appear in any corner. This scene also contains the principle of entropy increase.

We can also think of entropy in terms of possibilities or probabilities. For example, there are 100 locations in a room where you can place items, and you need to place 20 items. By combining them, we can calculate the total number of ways to place 20 items in 100 locations, which is a huge number:

If the placement method in the upper part of the picture below is defined as "neat", that is, the 20 movable items in the picture are all placed in the appropriate position, and the rest of the placement methods are collectively called "chaotic". Then:

It is almost impossible to maintain such "neatness" for a long time, and "chaos" is inevitable, so "neatness" can easily turn into "chaos", which shows that everything is developing towards disorder and increasing entropy.

The law of increasing entropy further states that everything in the universe starts with a certain value and structure, and then irreversibly moves toward chaos and desolation. No matter whether any order is established on Earth, in the universe, or anywhere else, it will come at the cost of greater order and chaos in the surrounding environment.

Just like the giant cities and skyscrapers we live in, they cause excessive input and dissipation of energy: for example, the energy from burning coal does not disappear, but is converted and dissipated into space along with carbon dioxide and other gases; excessive packaging of food is also consuming a large amount of the earth's energy; plastics and metals are not recycled and are buried in the environment.

All of these produce entropy or energy waste. Therefore, low-entropy agriculture, low-entropy industry, low-entropy life, low-entropy society, etc. have become things that humans must do to maintain their own survival.

By default, everything in our lives is in a high entropy state unless we pay more attention to it. Just as water flows from high to low, electricity flows from high potential energy to low potential energy. Without external forces doing work, everything is moving towards disorder and chaos.

Therefore, when the law of increasing entropy returns to our daily lives, we know that self-discipline is more painful than laziness, and giving up is easier than persistence. But if we do not fight against the law of increasing entropy, everything from the universe to companies, teams, and even personal self-management will become increasingly out of control over time.

Written by:

Xing Meibo, Associate Professor of the School of Environmental and Energy Engineering, Beijing University of Civil Engineering

Recipients of the Beijing Association for Science and Technology's 2021-2023 Youth Talent Support Project