Why don’t knives exist that become sharper as you use them? Why is cleaning a natural assumption for dinner? Why don’t buildings grow stronger over time on their own?
We take these things for granted on a very everyday level. Just as milk naturally spreads in tea due to thermodynamics, similar interactions arise from the constant struggle between entropy and complexity. Entropy can be described as chaos, unpredictability, decay, and destruction, all referring to the same phenomenon. In contrast, we have complexity, also known as order, life, usability, and creativity.
But how does complexity arise when reality itself seems designed to break it down? Everything humans do results in a loss of usability to heat. Furthermore, complexity requires a breakdown and appropriation of another type of complexity. For instance, when the highly usable energy in oil is converted into mechanical energy in a diesel engine, 60% of that energy is lost to unusable heat and sound.
There is, however, one source that has, over the last 4.5 billion years, brought order to Earth through its light: the sun. The sun provides exactly as much energy to Earth as Earth passively loses to the surrounding vacuum. Yet, plants can grow, and societies can emerge. In reality, Earth retains only the thermodynamic negentropy (the opposite of entropy) inhabiting light. When sunlight strikes the Earth, it is short-wavelength and concentrated on the side facing the sun. When the earth passively emits that energy back into space, it does so in the form of long-wavelength, high-entropy radiation.
Because Earth is constantly supplied with negative entropy, simple molecules can assemble into complex and organic forms, enabling plants to perform photosynthesis. However, existence requires constant effort. Thus, animals die if they do not eat, and societies collapse if they do not work continuously to sustain themselves.
But societies cannot survive solely with doctors, masons, and farmers. The existence of society is directly linked to these workers having tools to work with and natural resources to exploit. To manufacture solar cells, we need batteries, which require lithium. However, lithium is rare, resulting from a long, complicated, and transformative process from its formation in supernovae to its transportation to Earth. When we use lithium and discard batteries in landfills, we consume the order that was crystallized in the material. Recycling batteries is more challenging than refining raw lithium because recycling requires restoring the order that nature initially provided.
This eternal struggle between entropy and complexity permeates the very reality we inhabit, setting the framework for its unfolding. It is the most defining and central law governing our universe—a yin and yang that cannot exist without each other, much like light and darkness. This archetypal, ancient conflict manifests in the disasters threatening humanity. Climate change is a direct result of humanity’s unrestrained consumption of the Earth’s complexity and life. We live on a speck of dust in an eternal void, sustained only by the sun, and we delude ourselves into thinking that a natural law will rescue us from our overconsumption. When we choose private cars over public transport or constantly buy new items instead of maintaining and repairing our old ones, we each steal a little piece of nature’s creativity. Who steals the most is another question.
In 2012, humanity consumed as much energy as was used from the birth of Confucius to the death of Socrates. Can the greatest achievements of 2012 be compared to the technological, philosophical, and social progress made by humanity back then?
The implication of this worldview is that all phenomena can be understood as exchanges of chaos and complexity. Milk flows into tea as inevitably and fundamentally as life springs from a cosmic influx of complexity from the sun. Science studies the pressure distribution of entropy and negentropy across various fields like physics, chemistry, and biology. It is these concentrations of complexity that serve as the foundation for the emergence observed in biological life from lifeless molecules and consciousness from our biological brains.