Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don’t have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions”
— Seth Lloyd; Nature 430, 971 (26 August 2004)
Much have been written about the second law of thermodynamics in the last hundred and fifty some years; from its relation to the arrow of time, to the expansion of the universe, gravity, entropy, order and disorder, quantum mechanics, chemical reactions and lots more — not the least controversial of which is the recent rhetoric about its connection to biological evolution and creationism. Some people even went as far as dubbing it: “The … most powerful, most general idea in all of science.” (I am not going to treat any of these connections in this post, but feel free to ask for references. It should be relatively easy to find information about any of the aforementioned topics — a good place to start is the Wikipedia entry, which, incidently, is where I found the opening quote.)
What I want to argue in this post however, as the title suggests, is that the second law is ingrained in everyone’s perception of everyday experience — notwithstanding some people’s heedlessness of the labelling and the underlying concepts. Let me illustrate with an example.
Examine this photograph (taken in my kitchen, i.e. on Earth) for a minute:
If you feel that this doesn’t look right, not only would you be correct, but you would also be (maybe unknowingly) invoking two fundamental principles of physics: One, your recognition that this configuration is not a stable configuration of this particular system demonstrates your familiarity with the influence of gravity; and Two, your thinking that this system, left to itself, should’ve evolved to a stable configuration, is an invokation of the second law of thermodynamics — in fact, this is precisely one way to state the second law.
If this doesn’t convince you, think of those videos of broken pots assembling off the floor and then rising in the air, or smoke collecting from a room into a smoker’s mouth, or any video run backwards — how do you recognize that the video is going back in time? My argument is: We are all familiar with The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
(Now, concerning the photo; since there are a bunch of ways this trick could’ve been performed, I left two clues in the photograph as to which trick was used.)
