Can Science Provide An Excuse for Goofing Off?
(*apologies to Enya)
With the World Series over, I could no longer put off raking leaves. The one time I wanted it to rain on a weekend, the skies were blue and the temperature fine. Muttering sullenly, I let my thoughts wander from a Homer Simpson oath -- "Stupid trees!" -- to a pseudo-sociological critique: "Why do we feel the need to tidy up after nature? What would be so bad about letting the leaves go their own ways?"
Rake, rake, bag, bag.
For awhile I distracted myself with the malicious pleasure of despising people who engage in status competitions over the purity of their lawns. "I mean, who needs to see what's under the leaves in November?" I grumbled. "Tari and I know better. We're only doing this so our neighbors don't get mad at us."
But the more I chewed on that thought, the less flavorful it became. So I let my mind wander again, and this time it flitted to entropy. Living things, I recalled, bring high degrees of complex order to the environment, but only at the cost of higher overall disorder. A worm, for example, is a highly ordered little soil-processing machine. It takes in all sorts of order at one end and puts out a nicely randomized "cast" at the other. And so, for that matter, do you and I. The only difference is that in addition, we go to work, pay taxes, and have a little fun into the bargain.
All living things produce more disorder than order. The Second Law of Thermodynamics assures us this is so. And here, in these endless sackfuls of brown leaves, was dead proof.
Rake, rake, bag, bag.
Entropy is the scientific name for disorder, but like many concepts in science, it doesn't translate neatly into ordinary language. It sounds like a bad thing, but without entropy the world would appear even more chaotic. The flow of time would be unpredictable (as it is in the quantum world), and you could never be sure which direction energy would take. Entropy gives our world predictability: in the long run, everything runs down.
Despite my distaste for raking leaves, I do prefer order to chaos. I'm sure you do, too. It's a deeply ingrained human tendency. Yet, contrary to what we might expect, a little disequilibrium is no bad thing. We could not live without it.
Murray Gell-Mann, the 1969 Nobel laureate in physics, explains this in a marvelously wide-ranging book whose title, The Quark and the Jaguar, just happens to remind us that it was he, Murray Gell-Mann, who named the chief component of nuclear particles. (Like most giants of theoretical physics, Gell-Mann overwhelms us with modesty.)
"[I]f the environment in question is at the center of the sun, at a temperature of tens of millions of degrees, there is almost total randomness ... [and] nothing like life can exist. Nor can there be such a thing as life if the environment is a perfect crystal at a temperature of absolute zero.... For a complex adaptive system [Gell-Mann's way of describing life and its analogues] to function, conditions are required that are intermediate between order and disorder." (pp. 115-116)
Rake, rake, bag, bag.
To put this another way, if either order or entropy max out, we're dead. We only live because we're able to take advantage of a 10 billion-year local transition from order to disorder. Thanks to gravity, our Sun is at disequilibrium with its environment. It is trying as hard as it can to get back to equilibrium by radiating away billions of tons of its mass every second, and life on Earth is soaking up as much of that radiated energy as possible. We, and the rest of the animal kingdom, are merely parasites feeding second-hand on that energy and its byproducts, as harvested by plants and autotrophic microorganisms.
All of us, in turn, radiate away unusable energy, as well as producing waste by various other means. Over the nearly 4 billion year evolution of life, the global ecosystem has developed amazingly efficient means of extracting all the available energy in the system. Thus, the waste that mammals produce can be fertilizer for crops, and the leaves that trees drop can feed the worms that turn the soil. There is a lesson in all this.
A little disorder on the lawn is no bad thing. To be a good steward of the planet, I should let the rest of those leaves lie exactly where they are. And so I shall! Thank you, science!
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Thomas Rogers
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
the sun will burn out in a few billion years....
Even consumers in the sense of killing and eating other animals are still not considered parasitic - perhaps because in death is a complete lack of suffering since there is no consciousness of any consequences at all.
Not so! It would be more accurate to say that DYING things produce more disorder than order. A living leaf, for example, takes in energy and produces more order, in its chemistry, within itself or its tree.
Entropy has to do with energy - which also translates to matter and everything else. The hiccup when it comes to living processes is that they actually use energy to rebuild their constantly expiring cells, tissues, organs, themselves, society, environment, etc.
Entropy is still very much present in living systems - proved by the fact that if the energy of the sun were to ever blink out, then life would soon follow suit until a form of life figures out a way to tap into other forms of energy - or eliminate/minimize the need to consume energy to that which is available to them.
On the issue of leaves - the only order I see is more of a moral than a scientific dilemma. If no one cares, then it's a waste of time. If they do - and you benefit from satisfying their desires, then it's not a waste of time.
Better to err on the side of caution, I'd think - the consequences of being considered a bad neighbor (especially long term) can be distressful. Though, I'm not sure how far one can push leaf-covered lawns to an extreme such as heralding the demise of an entire neighborhood. ;)
that was really funny! i liked the reference to Homer. I also know what you mean by "But the more I chewed on that thought, the less flavorful it became." That happens all the time with my homework.
love, Nainoa
Second, some of you question whether life produces more disorder than order. It does. A leaf is not an organism, but only a part of one. Take a tree as a whole and, like anything else with a metabolism, it cannot help but increase entropy over its life cycle. Whatever order it produces is paid for by a net surplus of entropy. However, we get so much "free" energy from the sun (plus a bit from geothermal and chemical sources in the Earth) to put to work in building order that it appears to us as if life is increasing the amount of overall order. This is an illusion. If you could trace the fate of every particle involved in the transactions of life, you'd find that on average they are more disordered when life is done with them than before.
Ed, I refer you to Schroedinger's What is Life, a book I know you've read, for more on this from an authoritative source. He scorns the idea that life feeds on "energy," and instead argues that life feeds on "negative entropy" to stave off the decay to equilibrium. You can find the relevant passages here: http://dieoff.org/page150.htm
Best regards,
Clay
still think it is misleading to talk about living things as increasing disorder. I take your point about an ultimate increase in entropy, but living things obviously are sophisticated systems designed to increase order within the organism at the expense of order in the environment, while they are alive at least. in this sense, they violate the law of increase in entropy, or "temporarily work against it". in a sense life borrows temporarily against the entropy in the universe. I admit I have not read a scientist stating this, its just my own observation.
ps an excellent reference on parasites I have read is "parasite rex". again I dont think its accurate to say we are parasitic on plants. arguably, living nonplant organisms have a symbiotic relationship with plants [eg in the carbon dioxide/oxygen exchange, and in many other ways]. in zimmers book it is said that a stunning 3/5 species on earth are parasites. but term begins to lose meaning if you say, "everything is a parasite".