However, despite humanity’s eternal struggle to conquer, catalogue, and tame the primeval nature of the world, this tendency toward chaos and disorder lies within us as well. What’s more, the progress of human civilization has been creating a more ordered world for thousands of years by building skyscrapers, creating works of art, and crafting a more structured society, humans have battled against this law of disorder since our origins as a species. Physiologically, the complex and organized nature of our physical brain and body could not be considered “disordered” by any means. Human life itself defies the second law of thermodynamics. It’s just the way things are.” When I heard this statement, at first I did not entirely believe it to be true, because all of the evidence I had observed seemed to contradict it. “It’s the second law of thermodynamics Alayna the universe tends toward disorder. When I asked my father why destroying things was so much easier than building them, he responded in typical Ivy League engineer fashion.
My father and I had gone into downtown Philadelphia, and as we stood on the street corner, we saw an old building, adorned with handmade murals, painstakingly wrought arches, and decades of history, toppled by a wrecking ball the work of thousands of hours reduced to rubble in a fraction of a percentage of that time. The first time I became aware of this seemingly unstoppable march of the universe toward chaos, I was in 4 th grade.
#STATE THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS FREE#
Natural processes occur because the nature of the universe is to constantly seek out less ordered states of existence with less available thermodynamic free energy. In other words, the universe tends toward chaos. As we all know, the first law of thermodynamics is that you do not talk about thermodynamics (just kidding, it has something to do with the conservation of energy.) The second, less well known, law of thermodynamics states that in every natural thermodynamic process the sum of the entropies of all participating bodies is increased, or in some cases, unchanging.