Socks, the Doctor and the End of the Universe

This is a guest post by Robin George Andrews, a British PhD in volcanology.

Perhaps it was the trilogy of scientific manuscripts I've been badgering away at for the past twelve months; maybe it was the last-minute preparation for the upcoming conference across the Pacific; or, just maybe, I woke up in one of those "mornings" I hear about in myths and legends. I felt confused, bemused and a little stressed out. Sorting through my rubbish pile of clothing I, very briefly, considered cleaning my room.

Yes, I know. I was having a "moment".

As it turns out, cleaning your room—bringing a little order into the universe—is, in the overall scheme of things, a tad futile. Sure, you might be able to find your socks a bit easier, but the universe will not appreciate it for even the briefest of seconds.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, once remarked that New York has all the iridescence as the beginning of the world. Although the genesis of planet Earth was definitely pretty spectacular, with the empyreal commencement of the late-stage bombardment phase something well worth a watch for any passing sentient alien creature, I'm more fascinated by the end of all things. Not in the sense of the Earth ending in the expansion of our nearest star¹, no—I'm talking about the end of the Universe. I'm compelled by the process that drives everything, towards destruction. That process, the cornerstone of the second law of thermodynamics, is called entropy.

Entropy essentially states that every constituent body of matter and energy in the universe will trend from a simple structural order to potentially infinite forms of structural disorder. As the passage of time progresses in a system, it will splinter into more and more complex, non-reproducible thermodynamic forms until, in one way or another, it eradicates itself. It is also the only law that explains why time flows only in one direction: things trend from order to disorder, and there is no exception to this rule at an overall level. Energy within or between systems can be transferred via work (mechanical motion) or heat (which utilises the random movement of molecules in a system). In an isolated system, the gradual dissipation in mechanical energy over time—as work is converted to heat—will lead to a state wherein all energy is evenly distributed throughout. If you treat the Universe as an isolated system, the second law of thermodynamics therefore states that the entropy of said system will increase until all energy is evenly distributed throughout all of time and space, and consequently, there will be no nucleation points, no uneven distributions of matter or energy, for stars to form, and the universe will enter a heat death stage. This means that, as no energy will be exchanged, there will be no exchange of physical information, and consequently, time itself will stop.

Think of it like a piece of artwork created by putting thousands of coloured flower petals in set places. If the petals form an image of, for example, the old Japanese Rising Sun Flag, there are only a few very specific ways to arrange the petals to produce this image. If the wind picked up, the shape would be structurally lost, and as such, the petal structure is said to represent a system of low entropy. On the other hand, the same amount of petals in a pile could be blown around by the wind, but still retain the basic shape of a pile. In other words, there are many structural forms a system can take without losing its overall form, and thus is said to have high entropy. The universe, overall, is trending from this former, ordered state, to the latter, more disordered state.

Analysed data from CERN's Large Hadron Collider, a gigantic physics experiment that receives the same funding as a medium-sized European university, is lending credence to the idea that the universe is teetering on an entropy-decided end. The specific mass of the Higgs Boson suggests that the universe will end, billions of years from now, in a rapidly propagating apocalyptic bubble², and not in the heat death scenario most consensually agreed upon by cosmologists. Heat death makes thermodynamic sense; the bubble makes sense in the quantum realm. As it turns out, the universe is on the very edge of a physics-defined precipice, staring down into a pit of instability. We may be in a universe in a meta-stable state, one which requires only the tiniest of pushes to become unstable.³ Entropy, in one way or another, marches inexorably forwards towards the end game.

The thing that surprised me about this calculation is that very few mainstream news outlets reported on it. After all, it does concern the fate of literally everything, from stars and planets to Glastonbury and kittens. Quietly, under and across the European earth, scientists are coming to conclusions about the end of the universe. For most people, the apocalypse remains firmly within the realm of science fiction, and yet, we are finding more and more about it all the time.

Perhaps the most ridiculous sounding part about this tale of doom and gloom—apart from its inevitability—is that we are all contributing to it via the same, chaos-producing process. Anything you do in life, in a very technical manner of speaking, is only serving to increase the entropy, or disorder, of the universe. You cannot go back in time and re-order things. Your very existence, although a blip, a smudge, a speck of order amongst the plethora of disorder, is thermodynamically altering the fabric of the universe by breathing, blinking, berating, debating, procreating and procrastinating. We are constantly releasing energy back into the universe as heat, and any energy release into a system increases its entropic value. We are not separate from the universe: atomically, we are as part of is as the stars or the oceans are.

Yes, the universe is going to end one way or another, trillions of years from now. Even in a billion years, the Earth's atmosphere will boil off and the oceans will evaporate, leaving maybe only subterranean bacteria and archaea behind. Ho hum. Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, though: entropy can work in your favour.

Casual Entropy⁴ is a theory of thermodynamics that applies to everything, even individuals. It's a nascent but well-supported hypothesis that concludes that for systems—from galaxy formation, to economics, to trade routes, to linguistics, to you yourself—the most prosperous and "intelligent" of them have the most inherent chaos and disorder in them. Essentially, the more chaos you have in a system, the more possibilities you will have in the future, increasing the likelihood of said system having a more varied, longer, successful evolutionary process.

Also worth noting in the grand scheme of things is that—from its incendiary origins to its cold, dark conclusion—life as we know it is only possible for a negligible amount of time in this universe. Of course, that time is right now. It would seem a great shame to waste it, wouldn't you say? The universe may be heading towards the annihilation of all of reality, but there is only ever going to be one of you, even at the atomic level—and, it seems, the crazier your life appears to be, the better it will inherently become. In the words of an incredibly wise old man:

All the elements in your body were forged many, many, many millions of years ago in the heart of a faraway star that exploded and died. That explosion scattered those elements across the desolations of deep space. After so, so many millions of years, these elements came together to form new stars and new planets, and on and on it went. The elements came together, and burst apart, forming shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings—until, eventually, they came together to make you. You are unique in the Universe. There is only one of you, and there will never be another.

Who said that? Carl Sagan? Brian Cox? Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh no. This particular honour goes to the greatest scientific mind out there: The Doctor. Number Eleven to be precise.

So don't despair at the apocalyptic nature of the universe. Don't panic, as a certain intergalactic travel guide may recommend, and definitely don't feel compelled to clean your room: you'd only be going against the flow of time and chaos in the universe anyway. Introduce a little entropy into your life instead. After all, as Einstein said, ‘If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?' I'm sure the same applies to the state of one's room.

References:

¹ Earth Death: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23135934

² Apocalyptic Quantum Bubble: http://bib-pubdb1.desy.de/record/140403/files/1207.0980v2.pdf

³ Metastable Vaccuum: http://ctp.lns.mit.edu/Wilczek_Nature/(72)vacuum_metastable.pdf

⁴ Wissner-Gross, A.D. & Freer, C.E. (2013) Causal Entropic Forces, Physical Review Letters, 110, 168702-1 - 168702-5. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.168702

Image credit: Images provided by author.