But while our impact is inconsequential, that doesn’t mean that the room-tidying argument is wrong. Now, it’s true that on a practical level these arguments are junk because human activity is completely, incomprehensibly negligible from the point of view of the universe. Your friend pesters you to come for a jog? “Um, I’m sorry, I thought you liked the existence of the universe.” Someone at the bar asks you out on a date? “I’m sorry, I’d love to, but I’m trying to lower my entropic footprint.” You might already have noticed that this argument isn’t specific to room-tidying, and that in fact you can use it for almost any human activity. The heat death of the universe will happen when everything is in total disorder, so if tidying makes disorder increase a little faster then tidying (ever so slightly) hastens the heat death of the universe. This end-time scenario is known as the Heat Death of the Universe, which also seems like a pretty great name for your new heavy metal band.īut now we arrive at the truly important question: how does this relate to tidying your room? The logic I had was pretty simple: tidying your room is an example of trying to create order, and therefore (necessarily) it means creating more disorder in the universe overall. (Humans will be long dead by that point, which will be another major impediment to getting anything done). If the universe becomes a lukewarm soup it will be impossible to do anything new, because there won’t be any “free energy” left to do work with.
(Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed). Everything humans want to do involves taking some substance (such as petroleum or sugar) that has accessible energy and using it in a way that does useful work but leaves the energy in a less-accessible state, such as in ever-so-slightly hotter air. This is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it’s a very big deal.Īnother big idea I learned from A Brief History was that - from the understanding of scientists at the time - the end of the universe would essentially be a vast, lukewarm soup of completely disorganized matter. But while we can’t always say precisely where the corresponding increase in disorder happened, we know that any local increase in order necessarily means more disorder in the universe on net. We can certainly make things more organized locally, thank goodness: for example, I’m grateful that somebody took a bunch of disordered sand and made it into the very well-ordered silicon chips in my laptop. But to make that happen your freezer has to create a large amount of heat, which agitates air particles, which (for example) causes a cup of water elsewhere in your kitchen to evaporate a little faster, transforming into the less-organized state of water vapor. By putting a tray of water in the freezer you’re transforming it from a less organized state (a liquid sloshing around in the container) to a more organized state (a beautiful crystalline solid). (Throughout this piece, when I talk about “disorder,” I’m really talking about entropy). The first big idea is that any attempt to impose order on the universe actually increases disorder overall. My story relied on a few big ideas from A Brief History. That the argument was asinine should go without saying, but an argument can be asinine and still technically correct. Surely, I argued, a tidy room wasn’t worth that… And I don’t mean I sat there screaming “Mum! Not now, I’m reading a book!”: if I understood it correctly, A Brief History of Time said that tidying my room would (in an absurdly, ridiculously tiny way) hasten the end of the universe. Instead of taking this beautiful book as a path to something useful, like a career in theoretical physics, I mainly used it as an excuse not to tidy my room. When I was a teenager I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.