Order in Nature

I wonder how many people I’ll lose after the next sentence. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system will increase over time. Don’t stop reading! I promise you—I’ll explain my point.

There is an awful lot of complicated math that goes into proving the 2nd law to explain that unless work (i.e. energy) is put into a system, it will inevitably become disordered.

What does this mean? Well, in everyday speak, it’s like cleaning your house. You clean your house, and over time it becomes progressively more cluttered and dusty. It will continue to do so until you put work (i.e. energy) into fixing it up again.

The 2nd law has more to it than just that entropy is inevitable, but that’s the part I’m thinking of now. While the 2nd law is a fundamental part of physics, it has relevance to all science. (Aside: as may become obvious as I continue to blog, physics is the root of it all.)

As a biologist, I realize that to create order, whether that is the manufacture of a complex molecule such as a protein, a highly organized single cell, or an entire multicellular organism (such as a person) requires a huge amount of energy (hence the fact that we must eat to maintain our system).

So, it is because the nature of nature is to become disordered that I find elegance in things that ARE ordered—especially in nature. The fixed number of petals found on flowers, the regular pattern of shapes on a shell, the periodic table.

The periodic table???!!!

Yup, the symbol of a science geek, mostly attributed to a Russian chemist by the name of Mendeleev in 1869. Think about it. The table represents all of the elements found in our universe. And the elements are constructed such that their atomic numbers can be placed in order, based on the number of protons in the nucleus of their atoms.

Hydrogen (H) has 1 proton, Helium (He) has 2, Lithium (Li) 3, and so on.

In other words, the elements are ordered. The building blocks of nature are ordered. There is elegance in that. And a lot of force goes in to maintaining the structure of the atom. The strong and weak nuclear forces are needed to maintain the atomic structure and keep the atom, with its oppositely charged protons and electrons, together. There is a lot of work involved in maintaining order.