Entropy and the Kitchen Sink
Is your sink full of dirty dishes right now? Mine is. Well, it isn’t full, but it’s got a few items in it I’ve been putting off washing since yesterday. There’s a plate I had pizza on last night, the knife I used to cut the pizza, a fork I used to pick sausages from the pizza when it was too hot to pick up the whole thing, one coffee cup shaped like a cow, and the little grease-catching tray thing from my George Foreman grill—a hold-out I missed during the last Great Kitchen Cleanup of 2012 sometime last week.
I’ll do dishes a couple times a week (on a good week), but almost never right after a meal. I let them build up a little before I give in. I think that’s normal. So normal that physicists even have a term for this practice of hygienic procrastination. They call it entropy. It’s the tendency for disorder to steadily increase in a system, or to think of it a different way, for the amount of useful work to decrease in a system over time. Some say it may eventually bring about an extreme state of critical sluggishness in the universe, when disorder has reached such epic levels that all the bits and pieces we’re made of, all the stars and planets and black holes and galaxies have completely degraded to a state of universal, equally distributed heat and matter. When life as we know it ceases to exist.
The ultimate sink full of dirty dishes.
(Don’t worry, we technically don’t need to worry about this breakdown for another 10^100 years. That’s a one with a hundred zeroes behind it, otherwise known as a googol.)
It isn’t such a bad thing, though. The fact that disorder increases in a system is a critical reason we’re alive in this universe to begin with. It really refers to the physical law that energy is always trying to create an equilibrium. It’s the same thing with the pizza I ate last night. The pizza is hot when it comes out of the oven, but eventually, it’ll get cooler as the heat—also a form of energy—dissipates into my kitchen air (or the roof of my mouth), in an effort to reach the same temperature as the rest of the surrounding system.
And this is irreversible—a crucial aspect of the nature of time in our universe. The pizza will not spontaneously become hot again. You can’t go back in time to un-bite into that scalding slice. Once the system has been balanced, that’s it. The potential for energy to be exchanged—or do work—in our enclosed pizza/kitchen air system has gone down.
You can re-heat the pizza, but that requires energy from somewhere else—electricity converted into heat or gas burned to create a flame maybe—to make it hotter. But eventually, that pizza will be just as cool as the air around it once again.
This irreversible balancing of energy is being played out across stages all over the universe, and since the total amount of energy in the universe is constant, this means that nature is trying to get us into a state where no energy exchange can happen. Perfect equilibrium. A state where the potential for work has disappeared completely.
Today, we use the term “entropy” loosely to describe all kinds of phenomena. Corporate entropy is the energy an organization wastes in dealing with bureaucratic red tape and inefficiency. Economic entropy is the permanent degradation of natural resources (and thus, energy). Even psychologists have an entropy. Their’s is related to the stubbornness of one’s personality and expresses the decreased capacity for dealing with sudden change.
But in physics, entropy is this continuous trend toward an overall decrease in the ability for work to get done in the universe.
So is Mother Nature encouraging us to just let those dishes pile up in our sinks?
On the scale of a googol, probably yes. In terms of turning my kitchen into an evolving ecosystem of exotic bacterial molds, fungi, and lines of marching ants, I’ll keep doing the work to wash my pizza plates and grease trays.
But if they pile up from time to time, that’s okay. I’ll just blame physics.