Saturday, February 27, 2010
An Essay on Entropy
Jessie B is a small kiwi librarian who loves scholarly things, like books and essays. One day she asked me why on earth my email was entropysid and how in the world i came up with that and what in tarnation it meant. Seeing that she had written me an riveting essay on The Tick, I figured I owed her an equally entertaining response.
Albert’s hair was unruly most of his life, probably due to the fact he spent more time in front of his Schreibmaschine than he ever did in front of a mirror. But that was mostly a good thing, since he wrote some of the greatest scientific articles that forever changed the course of human thought and never once won any money for beauty pageants. When Albert Einstein was 26 he wrote and published 3 essays that revolutionized the worldview of thermodynamics and physics. Really, it didn’t require an entire publication; he could have achieved the same results by scribbling those three simple letters and that single number on a dirty lunch napkin. This formula might look familiar to you : E=mc^2; or energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. It’s meaning is simple - there is a buttload, or a really huge amount, of energy in every material thing.
Rudolf Clausius, another German speaking physicist who probably also knew little about beauty pageants and more about greavity–defying hair products, was disproving prevailing thoughts on energy change by developing a slightly more complicated equation about a decade before Albert’s publications (and by more complicated I mean it had more than 3 letters). Rudolf discovered EnTr0Py and coined the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which measures the amount of disorder, chaos, or randomness in a system. And that seems like a fun thing to measure on a rainy day!
More than 100 years later, an insignificant and inconsequential 18yr old with as equally untamed hair as Albert sat in front of his desktop computer in northern California trying to concoct a clever email alias that didn’t require the word ‘dude’, an underscore or 2 irrelevant numbers tagged to the end of his email name, thereby preserving the purity of his true identity and avoiding being lumped into the abysmal cyberspace of the less creative email addresses. But, “Who am I? What defines me?” he asked himself. This essay details how a trifling lad with a rather abnormal first name sealed his social expectations for life in a half moment of brilliance, a flash of celestial inspiration and in just a few quick keystrokes; for with these, he created his identity and forever owned the title EnTr0PySid (@yahooo.com).
***
You’re bound to be a little different with a name like Jarom. I mean, your whole life you have to answer the same question; “Jeremy?” No. “Jared?” No. “Ah, Jerome?” No, it’s Jarom. Promise. After about 2,000 similar conversations, I developed about 100 different and increasingly more random explanations why ‘Jarom’ is so hard to say and it’s my fault because my name actually stems from a dead language or I had the same skin disease as Michael Jackson and my name was Jerome when I was black or that my parents meant to name me Jeremy, but the doctor and my parents were so enthralled with BYU’s game clinching touchdown on screen at that very moment of signing my birth certificate, they simply forgot to finish the ‘y’ in my name. At any rate, with every explanation I attempted to be more creative and more random and at the same time was separating myself from what I once understood as normal. And so a life of storytelling, antics and planned disorder began.
One should not suppose that I disagree with order, for I do not; in fact, organization and creating awesome are a passion of mine. I do believe that most social norms or status quos inhibit the majority of people from enjoying themselves fully. Humans (and their close relatives, like my bearded Aunt Susan) are severely complex organisms that rarely outwardly express what is occurring inside our complex bodies. Some famous physicist dude named PT Matthews said every “human being is…an assembly of chemicals constructed and maintained in a state of fantastically complicated organization of quite unimaginable improbability.” We humanoids act at times far too introverted and placid for the organized chaos within. While at University, I saw my fellow students as human capsules holding repressed energy in the prime of their life – personality, zaniness; randomness waiting to burst forth - they were defying Einstein’s most famous theory on Energy and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. They were fighting EnTr0Py and the honor code demanded that rules be adhered to!
My identity as entropy, and the chaotic inducing powers with them, fully blossomed at University. For the first time in my life I had complete freedom and embraced the ensuing improbability. I would revive randomness in the lives of these young, boring freshman! Oozing Energy and inclined to share it as quickly as I could with the mass of peers at my immediate disposal, I set to work teaching Clausius’ formula through the powerful tool of parables by antic. Within the first month I collected a dozen or so unlocked bikes, unclaimed couches and chairs from the dorms and hung them in the center tree; I rode a table down 4 flights of the steepest stairs on campus, walking away with only a bruised tailbone; I wore a different costume to class every Friday, announced in the middle of my accounting class that they were all welcome to come over and jump on my trampoline after the lecture. For a midterm I turned in a lifesize stuffed dummy in a refrigerator box and every February 14th I dressed as Cupid and shot potential couples with Love’s Nerf Arrow. These smaller, yet significant events eventually culminated to the blissful moment in which I felt I achieved entropic nirvana - dancing polka in Lederhose whilst 1258 similarly clad individuals flung pieces of an 8’x4’ cake as well as chunks of the recently demolished faux Berlin Wall through the air. At this moment, I knew I had done it. I had become entropy – the catalyst for pure, uninhibited chaos at BYU.
The goal behind Team Entropy (for it was much more fun to not do it alone) was to target the most socially dense areas on campus and there create such a disturbance that the students could not help but break free of the icy, numbing chokehold the standard Trinity of Get to Know You’s had on their minds and tongues since week one; Where are you from? What’s your major? How many credits do you have this semester? Indubitably, after each chaotic rendezvous, the questions of the crowd had a more creative tinge in them, the stress of messing up eased and two people that were previously engaged in a slow, dying conversation began to build upon this abnormal experience and sew a common framework, unique and separate to each beholder of this entropic disarray.
Let us use a real life example, accounted firsthand to me by one individual who triumphed at the hand(s) of EnTr0Py. One lovely February 14th on which love wafted through campus, cupid trounced about the humanities building in the customary pink, red, and glitter from head to toe when an excited young man stopped him asking if he was the very same cupid from the year before. Taken somewhat aback, I lowered my crossbow and uncocked the heart-shaped arrow I had at the ready for love-spreading and answered curiously in the affirmative, assuring him that there is but only one true cupid in all of Lovedom. Even more curiously, he then hugged me and began to explain that because of a carefully placed Hershey Kiss on his study table exactly one year ago, he was now happily married and expecting. a baby. person. He recalled that he had nothing to say to the beautiful woman who sat across from him that fateful day, a crush he had been nurturing to no avail for months. Oh, how he desperately wanted to ask her something – say anything interesting - any sort of quip that would set him apart from other suitors and win her favor. Well, apparently Cupid’s Rambo crawl approach, the smooth slide on his back across their homework papers, the backwards roll with a twist off the edge, both being shot simultaneously with Cupid’s love arrow and having only a single Hershey Kiss undulating in the exact center of the table as the only proof that the last 4 seconds ever occurred in either of their lives was just enough to strike up a conversation between them. That was all it took! This newly married lad further explained that that single event was enough of an ice breaker that soon brought about the sharing of past odd events in their individual lives and built enough of an immediate bond that he gained sufficient courage within that conversation to ask her out. They were married 7 months later and 5 months after that he was explaining this story to me.
This was but one instance of many where EnTr0Py fulfilled its purpose by disrupting solid social structure and allowing for richer and more personal relationship building. In this instance it was between two relative strangers, but the theory of social entropy and it’s proven principles apply in almost every situation with every combination of people from every walk of life (yes, even Aunt Susan or that weird guy that hums the same Dolly Parton song in the elevator every morning), each subconsciously seeking a small catalyst that boosts their confidence and enables them to lift themselves to a higher, perhaps hidden, social and emotional sphere. Social energy flow adheres to thermodynamic law, confidence and creativity flowing from high concentrations to low, eventually leading to equalization. Organized chaos spawns comfort; comfort creates confidence and confidence coolness. I have devoted the last decade of my life to hypothesizing, testing and proving this fascinating social theory based on randomness and individuals’ reaction to structured chaos and there through have become a more refined edition of the personality I first created 10+ years ago whilst sitting before my schreibmaschine - I am EnTr0Py Sid.
Albert’s hair was unruly most of his life, probably due to the fact he spent more time in front of his Schreibmaschine than he ever did in front of a mirror. But that was mostly a good thing, since he wrote some of the greatest scientific articles that forever changed the course of human thought and never once won any money for beauty pageants. When Albert Einstein was 26 he wrote and published 3 essays that revolutionized the worldview of thermodynamics and physics. Really, it didn’t require an entire publication; he could have achieved the same results by scribbling those three simple letters and that single number on a dirty lunch napkin. This formula might look familiar to you : E=mc^2; or energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. It’s meaning is simple - there is a buttload, or a really huge amount, of energy in every material thing.
Rudolf Clausius, another German speaking physicist who probably also knew little about beauty pageants and more about greavity–defying hair products, was disproving prevailing thoughts on energy change by developing a slightly more complicated equation about a decade before Albert’s publications (and by more complicated I mean it had more than 3 letters). Rudolf discovered EnTr0Py and coined the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which measures the amount of disorder, chaos, or randomness in a system. And that seems like a fun thing to measure on a rainy day!
More than 100 years later, an insignificant and inconsequential 18yr old with as equally untamed hair as Albert sat in front of his desktop computer in northern California trying to concoct a clever email alias that didn’t require the word ‘dude’, an underscore or 2 irrelevant numbers tagged to the end of his email name, thereby preserving the purity of his true identity and avoiding being lumped into the abysmal cyberspace of the less creative email addresses. But, “Who am I? What defines me?” he asked himself. This essay details how a trifling lad with a rather abnormal first name sealed his social expectations for life in a half moment of brilliance, a flash of celestial inspiration and in just a few quick keystrokes; for with these, he created his identity and forever owned the title EnTr0PySid (@yahooo.com).
***
You’re bound to be a little different with a name like Jarom. I mean, your whole life you have to answer the same question; “Jeremy?” No. “Jared?” No. “Ah, Jerome?” No, it’s Jarom. Promise. After about 2,000 similar conversations, I developed about 100 different and increasingly more random explanations why ‘Jarom’ is so hard to say and it’s my fault because my name actually stems from a dead language or I had the same skin disease as Michael Jackson and my name was Jerome when I was black or that my parents meant to name me Jeremy, but the doctor and my parents were so enthralled with BYU’s game clinching touchdown on screen at that very moment of signing my birth certificate, they simply forgot to finish the ‘y’ in my name. At any rate, with every explanation I attempted to be more creative and more random and at the same time was separating myself from what I once understood as normal. And so a life of storytelling, antics and planned disorder began.
One should not suppose that I disagree with order, for I do not; in fact, organization and creating awesome are a passion of mine. I do believe that most social norms or status quos inhibit the majority of people from enjoying themselves fully. Humans (and their close relatives, like my bearded Aunt Susan) are severely complex organisms that rarely outwardly express what is occurring inside our complex bodies. Some famous physicist dude named PT Matthews said every “human being is…an assembly of chemicals constructed and maintained in a state of fantastically complicated organization of quite unimaginable improbability.” We humanoids act at times far too introverted and placid for the organized chaos within. While at University, I saw my fellow students as human capsules holding repressed energy in the prime of their life – personality, zaniness; randomness waiting to burst forth - they were defying Einstein’s most famous theory on Energy and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. They were fighting EnTr0Py and the honor code demanded that rules be adhered to!
My identity as entropy, and the chaotic inducing powers with them, fully blossomed at University. For the first time in my life I had complete freedom and embraced the ensuing improbability. I would revive randomness in the lives of these young, boring freshman! Oozing Energy and inclined to share it as quickly as I could with the mass of peers at my immediate disposal, I set to work teaching Clausius’ formula through the powerful tool of parables by antic. Within the first month I collected a dozen or so unlocked bikes, unclaimed couches and chairs from the dorms and hung them in the center tree; I rode a table down 4 flights of the steepest stairs on campus, walking away with only a bruised tailbone; I wore a different costume to class every Friday, announced in the middle of my accounting class that they were all welcome to come over and jump on my trampoline after the lecture. For a midterm I turned in a lifesize stuffed dummy in a refrigerator box and every February 14th I dressed as Cupid and shot potential couples with Love’s Nerf Arrow. These smaller, yet significant events eventually culminated to the blissful moment in which I felt I achieved entropic nirvana - dancing polka in Lederhose whilst 1258 similarly clad individuals flung pieces of an 8’x4’ cake as well as chunks of the recently demolished faux Berlin Wall through the air. At this moment, I knew I had done it. I had become entropy – the catalyst for pure, uninhibited chaos at BYU.
The goal behind Team Entropy (for it was much more fun to not do it alone) was to target the most socially dense areas on campus and there create such a disturbance that the students could not help but break free of the icy, numbing chokehold the standard Trinity of Get to Know You’s had on their minds and tongues since week one; Where are you from? What’s your major? How many credits do you have this semester? Indubitably, after each chaotic rendezvous, the questions of the crowd had a more creative tinge in them, the stress of messing up eased and two people that were previously engaged in a slow, dying conversation began to build upon this abnormal experience and sew a common framework, unique and separate to each beholder of this entropic disarray.
Let us use a real life example, accounted firsthand to me by one individual who triumphed at the hand(s) of EnTr0Py. One lovely February 14th on which love wafted through campus, cupid trounced about the humanities building in the customary pink, red, and glitter from head to toe when an excited young man stopped him asking if he was the very same cupid from the year before. Taken somewhat aback, I lowered my crossbow and uncocked the heart-shaped arrow I had at the ready for love-spreading and answered curiously in the affirmative, assuring him that there is but only one true cupid in all of Lovedom. Even more curiously, he then hugged me and began to explain that because of a carefully placed Hershey Kiss on his study table exactly one year ago, he was now happily married and expecting. a baby. person. He recalled that he had nothing to say to the beautiful woman who sat across from him that fateful day, a crush he had been nurturing to no avail for months. Oh, how he desperately wanted to ask her something – say anything interesting - any sort of quip that would set him apart from other suitors and win her favor. Well, apparently Cupid’s Rambo crawl approach, the smooth slide on his back across their homework papers, the backwards roll with a twist off the edge, both being shot simultaneously with Cupid’s love arrow and having only a single Hershey Kiss undulating in the exact center of the table as the only proof that the last 4 seconds ever occurred in either of their lives was just enough to strike up a conversation between them. That was all it took! This newly married lad further explained that that single event was enough of an ice breaker that soon brought about the sharing of past odd events in their individual lives and built enough of an immediate bond that he gained sufficient courage within that conversation to ask her out. They were married 7 months later and 5 months after that he was explaining this story to me.
This was but one instance of many where EnTr0Py fulfilled its purpose by disrupting solid social structure and allowing for richer and more personal relationship building. In this instance it was between two relative strangers, but the theory of social entropy and it’s proven principles apply in almost every situation with every combination of people from every walk of life (yes, even Aunt Susan or that weird guy that hums the same Dolly Parton song in the elevator every morning), each subconsciously seeking a small catalyst that boosts their confidence and enables them to lift themselves to a higher, perhaps hidden, social and emotional sphere. Social energy flow adheres to thermodynamic law, confidence and creativity flowing from high concentrations to low, eventually leading to equalization. Organized chaos spawns comfort; comfort creates confidence and confidence coolness. I have devoted the last decade of my life to hypothesizing, testing and proving this fascinating social theory based on randomness and individuals’ reaction to structured chaos and there through have become a more refined edition of the personality I first created 10+ years ago whilst sitting before my schreibmaschine - I am EnTr0Py Sid.
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