On vacation in foreground: Eric Zencey

At work in background: Second law of thermodynamics

Q&A with Eric Zencey

Why do you love the Second Law?

as interviewed by David Dobbs

© Eric Zencey 2007

with thanks to the Montpelier Bridge, where it originally appeared

DD: Briefly, what got you started writing?

EZ:  It's hard to remember--it seems that I've always had this urge to put words out there on paper.  I suppose my life as a writer started in elementary school:  I liked writing, liked myself when I wrote, liked the praise I got for doing it.  I loved the way you could make fine gradations of meaning if you had the right words and used them the right way.  By the time I was in high school, I was reading handbooks on punctuation because they were interesting.  Writing became a habit, so much so that I write because I have to.  I feel weird and unsettled if I'm not writing regularly.  

DD: Why "The Second Law of Thermodynamics"?

EZ:  Because I do very much admire it.

DD: How did you come to love entropy?  

EZ:  Well, let's be clear:  I love the law of entropy, not entropy itself.  Entropy is the natural, unavoidable process by which valuable matter and energy become unvaluable.  The law of entropy is an amazing discovery in the history of human intellect--it's only a hundred and fifty years old, which is not so long as these things go.  And it helps to explain quite a lot of things--why you can't push a car backwards and fill the gas tank, why a movie run backwards looks interestingly weird, why something that's broken can't fix itself.  And, come to think of it, how and why plants and animals, within limits, can and do fix themselves--maintain and repair themselves against the assults that life brings.  

DD: How does this relate to the rest of your work -- and in particular  

to your interests in history and the environment? Is this more a  

continuity, a digression, or a new direction altogether?

EZ:  I see a continuity.  Not to give away too much of my talk, but entropy has been called "Time's Arrow."  It's the only physical law of universal application that describes a one-way flow in time. Newton's laws are reversible in time--smack the billiard balls this way, smack them that way, it doesn't matter.  But entropy, no.  Which means, if it weren't for the entropy process, we wouldn't even experience time.  So there's a connection to history at this fundamental level. Less abstractly:  every civilization has had an energy infrastructure:  mostly it's been agriculture, with some wind and water, and now you've got us with our systematic exploitation of antique solar income in the form of fossil fuels.  The history of energy use is an interesting way to look at civilizations, and its interesting because of entropy:  the energy available to us isn't infinite.  As I'll discuss in my talk, I think that appreciation of the law of entropy is the best path toward understanding how to integrate a sustainable human culture into its necessary grounding in nature.  We're not sustainable now:  our economic processes suck up more valuable matter and energy than the planet can sustainably give to us, and they exhaust back into the environment more degraded matter and energy--more waste--than the planet can sustainably absorb from us.  Thermodynamics--in particular the law of entropy--is the ground on which economics and ecology ultimately meet.  Though most economists don't know this yet.  

DD: What are the best things you've read on the subject?

EZ:

One great book is The Second Law:  Energy, Chaos, and Form by P. W. Atkins.  For the application of the entropy law to economics, the classic book is Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process.  It's thirty years old, and it's a  technical treatise in economics.  It's got the scope and ambition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.  I think it will prove to be one of those books that becomes an important, culture-changing classic.  I talk about it a bit in some of the essays I've written.  And The Party's Over:  Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg starts with an explanation of the second law and its relevance to how we think about economics.

DD: When I think of entropy I always think of two things. One is ice  

melting. THe other is this great New Yorker cartoon that shows an  

office where the desk is half fallen over, the pictures are tilted on  

the walls, the cabinet door is off the hinges, and a guy is lying on  

the floor; the door to the office says "Department of Entropy." Do you  

know any good entropy jokes?

EZ:  No, but I know some entropy poetry:  "I am a sleepless/ slowfaring eater/ maker of rust and rot..../I am the Law/ Older than you/ and your builders proud./...I am the crumbler:  tomorrow." Robert Frost.  And there's T.S. Eliot:  "This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends /This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper."  But humor, no.  That New Yorker cartoon nailed it.  Wait--come to think of it, my parents did have a framed cartoon in the hallway when I was growing up that showed two lump-shaped people slouching in chairs at a table, very low energy, surrounded by mess:  stacks of papers, unwashed dishes, things that hadn't been put away.  And the caption was, "Next week we've got to get organized."  Complete self-diagnosis on my parents' part.  

DD: So is this talk about entropy mainly as a physical force, or are  

we going to get metaphorical?

EZ: I'm going to confess that I haven't really pulled the talk together yet.  I think I'm going to be literal, mostly.  Though I probably will talk about how the idea of entropy offers us a new root metaphor--a new paradigm--for understanding ourselves, and our culture, in relation to the world.  See, there's this philosopher I like who said that at bottom, we humans tend to use one or another of a limited set of basic or root metaphors to interpret our experiences in the world.  "Everything is like a machine."  "No, everything is like a living thing--an organism."  So you have mechanism and organicism.  The entropy idea is the basic idea behind a way of seeing that isn't mechanism, isn't organicism, but something else--it harks back to the PreSocratics, like Thales, who saw everything as a manifestation of a single generating substance.  

DD: Other than second-law stuff, what are you reading these days?

EZ:  Right now I've got Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln at hand--not the full multi-volume thing, but a stripped-down single volume that Sandburg did toward the end of his life.  I've been reading it in parallel with Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals. I just got it into my head a few weeks ago that I needed to know more about Lincoln as President.  We certainly could use someone of his vision and wisdom in the office today.  (And you know, I don't think it was an accident that he was, hands down, one of the two best writers ever to be President--the other being Thomas Jefferson, of course.)  And my book group wouldn't forgive me if I didn't also mention that I'm about to start reading Dickens' Great Expectations again.