Dying Inside

“You make it sound so evil, Tom.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I’m just telling you that there’s this girl I can’t read, that I’ve never been up against this situation before, that I wonder if you have any theories to account for why she’s the way she is.”

“I don’t,” Nyquist said. “Not off the top of my head.”

“All right, then. I—”

But Nyquist wasn’t finished. “You realize that I have no way of telling whether she’s opaque to the telepathic process in general or just opaque to you, David.” That possibility had occurred to Selig a moment earlier. He found it deeply disturbing. Nyquist went on smoothly, “Suppose you bring her around one of these days and let me take a look at her. Maybe I’ll be able to learn something useful about her that way.”

“I’ll do that,” Selig said without enthusiasm. He knew such a meeting was necessary and inevitable, but the idea of exposing Kitty to Nyquist produced agitation in him. He had no clear understanding of why that should be happening. “One of these days soon,” he said. “Look, all the phones are lighting up. I’ll be in touch, Tom.”

“Give her one for me,” said Nyquist.

TWENTY-THREE.

David Selig

Selig Studies 101, Prof. Selig

November 10, 1976

Entropy As a Factor in Everyday Life

Entropy is defined in physics as a mathematical expression of the degree to which the energy of a thermodynamic system is so distributed as to be unavailable for conversion into work. In more general metaphorical terms, entropy may be seen as the irreversible tendency of a system, including the universe, toward increasing disorder and inertness. That is to say, things have a way of getting worse and worse all the time, until in the end they get so bad that we lack even the means of knowing how bad they really are.

The great American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) was the first to apply the second law of thermodynamics — the law that defines the increasing disorder of energy moving at random within a closed system — to chemistry. It was Gibbs who most firmly enunciated the principle that disorder spontaneously increases as the universe grows older. Among those who extended Gibbs’ insights into the realm of philosophy was the brilliant mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), who declared, in his book The Human Use of Human Beings, “As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs’ universe order is least probable, chaos most probable. But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves.”

Thus Wiener hails living things in general and human beings in particular as heroes in the war against entropy — which he equates in another passage with the war against evil: “This random element, this organic incompleteness [that is, the fundamental element of chance in the texture of the universe], is one which without too violent a figure of speech we may consider evil.” Human beings, says Wiener, carry on anti-entropic processes. We have sensory receptors. We communicate with one another. We make use of what we learn from one another. Therefore we are something more than mere passive victims of the spontaneous spread of universal chaos. “We, as human beings, are not isolated systems. We take in food, which generates energy, from the outside, and are, as a result, parts of that larger world which contains those sources of our vitality. But even more important is the fact that we take in information through our sense organs, and we act on information received.” There is feedback, in other words. Through communication we learn to control our environment, and, he says, “In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency . . . for entropy to increase.” In the very long run entropy must inevitably nail us all; in the short run we can fight back. “We are not yet spectators at the last stages of the world’s death.”

But what if a human being turns himself, inadvertently or by choice, into an isolated system?