Entropy never dies. That story.

[rich]

those little pockets of disorder are a nice metaphor for Pynchon's imagined
utopias:hippie communes, anarchist spaces, DeepArcher and family

rich

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 5:11 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> *love the line phrase: "contraptions that squeeze out the disorder that is
> locked inside of matter"*
>
> *From an interview with Somebody Greene, physicist with a new book.
> Guardian interview. *
>
> *"In your book, you talk about the rising disorder – the increasing entropy
> – of the universe, and how that shapes its future. If the universe is
> becoming more and more disordered, why do stars, planets and people form?
> "*
> "This is absolutely fundamental. The beauty of the second law of
> thermodynamics is that while it stipulates that the overall amount of
> disorder has to increase, little pockets of order can form so long as, in
> the process, they create enough disorder in the surrounding environment to
> compensate. For stars and planets, we can establish that the formation
> process discards enough waste and disorder to the surrounding environment
> that the overall disorder goes up. Indeed, we humans are contraptions that
> squeeze out the disorder that is locked inside of matter. We eat things, we
> breathe, and when we metabolise all that we take in, we use it to create
> our internal order, to grow bigger, stronger and so forth, but in the
> process we release enough heat and waste so that the overall disorder
> balance sheet is totally in the direction of disorder."
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>