entropy and lemonade

a photo of the woods that reminds me of home

I was out with friends at a local establishment one night and really wanted a lemonade. I mean, I really wanted a lemonade. When I ordered it, the bar tender gave me a weird look; when I went to pay, he said: “it’s water, sugar, and lemon, dude. Don’t worry about it.” That moment brought me an immense amount of joy, and it made me realize that lemonade was something that could continue to bring me joy. Since then, I have consumed lemonade at almost every dining hall meal. Most of the time I’ll mix it with water, because I have convinced myself that this makes the habit less twelve-year-old-like.

Give me a moment. Over Thanksgiving break, I read a book about the history of thermodynamics. I understood maybe half of it. Actually, probably more like a third. I’m a humanities guy (which is code for I don’t have the attention span for math problems), so I understood very little of the book. What I did take away was some stuff about entropy. Namely, the probabilistic basis for understanding entropy.

“Entropy” is a measure of the unavailability of heat to do work in given system and the randomness of the particle arrangement of that system. But it can also be understood as the dispersion of heat. Entropy is a value that will always gradually increase over time. In simple terms, picture a house with two rooms— one hot, one cold. Over time, heat will even out between those two rooms; as heat flows from the hot to the cold room, entropy increases.

I think it’s easy to be pretty pessimistic about the direction of the universe. I’m pretty sure that most people have a basic understanding (if even a subconscious one) of the notion that the universe is slowly dying over time— entropy is a son of a bitch that won’t wait for anyone, and all things tend to become become more disordered as a categorical rule. In this context, it’s also easy to view entropy as a malicious entity. But if we understand it probabilistically, entropy is really just an obvious, and rather benign concept.

Think of a jar of marbles, 50% yellow and 50% purple. Stay the jar starts with the top being all purple marbles and the bottom all yellow. When you shake the jar, what will happen? Well, over time, the marbles will mix. Eventually, you’ve got a pretty even distribution of yellow and purple marbles. That’s entropy. Not the malicious dissipation of heat in a manner contrary to the essential conditions for beauty. No, sir. Entropy is just simply the result of basic probability: it is more probable that the jar is evenly mixed, and so every shake will, on average, make it more evenly mixed. Entropy, in other words, is the result of the fact that more probable events will happen more frequently. And that is a result of the fact that things exist.

So, entropy’s not evil. But what’s the point of me saying this? The point is that there’s a second conclusion we can draw here. If entropy results in more things becoming spread out over time, then it also, in my mind, affirms the butterfly effect in an interesting way. If the marbles were to all stay orderly, or if they were to continuously shift into equally unlikely arrangements ad infinitum, then it might be that not every marble would get to have an effect on the others. But because everything is getting spread out, over time, the shit you do to one marble will have a chance of impacting the next phase of existence for every other marble. Put it another way: without entropy, the particles from an exploding star might all stay clumped together for infinity, never dispersing. But because of entropy, as infinity draws nearer, the particles of that star will become more and more mixed with everything else. Entropy implies that some cosmic soup with a high entropy (and a low level of uniqueness) will greet us at the end of the universe, but it also implies that the cosmic soup will be a composite of all of the different events leading up to its creation. This means that, while everything you do is conditioned by entropy, entropy also gives you a guarantee that your actions, no matter how minute their impact may become, will continue to color the soup over time. That’s rather beautiful.

Anyways, lemonade. Lemonade goes back a long, long ways. In 14th century Egypt, people consumed a drink made of lemons, dates, and honey. In the late 1600s, a company sold lemonade from tanks on the streets of Paris. Apparently, in the US, when Women’s Christian Temperance Movement pushed abstinence from alcohol, lemonade was the replacement beverage of choice. During the outbreak of the Spanish flu, PSAs told Americans to “Avoid crowds, take adequate exercise, get plenty of sleep, and drink one or two glasses of hot lemonade daily.” Now, it’s sold, well, everywhere. The first sporting event I ever attended was the NCAA lacrosse championships when I was in elementary school. I drank a frozen lemonade, and soaked in the sun as I listed to my father and brotherly energetic discuss concepts of in-game strategy that I was too bewildered to grasp. The lemonade was yummy. The Egyptians would have been proud.

Add to this catalogue of events, as a small, teensy-weensie footnote to the history of lemonade: the bartender who gave me a free drink. A free lemonade! What a treat! And what a treat to have seen it reverberated throughout my days. The newfound willingness to drink lemonade at every meal has brought me so many moments of joy, minuscule in terms of immediate perceptibility but no less capable of compounding over my many meals. And what went into these moments of joy? An infinite cascade of impacts over the course of lemonade’s history. Perhaps a throw-away, bad-night-to-be-on-shift-so-what-the-hell moment from the bartender. The unintended consequences of Egyptian politics. 17th century France’s bizarre street culture. And, of course: the slow march of humanity to extinction, of the sun to implosion, and of the universe toward cosmic-soupiness. Because of entropy’s guarantee that things will bump into other things, I get to enjoy my favorite greenish-yellow beverage. And I get to smile.

Entropy will always increase. But that’s not evil, or bad. Things that are more likely to happen will happen more often, and so, when you die, the shards of your bones will subdivide until they are nothing but molecules. Those molecules will mix with the stardust and the dirt. Perhaps they will become a forest, or a diamond on a far-away moon. Everything you do or say will touch everything else.

Everything you do or say will touch everything else.

All that is good in this world, all that is new and exciting, all that is comfortable, all of the lemonades we get to drink; it is all caused by that simple fact. Things interact, and the song they play, while it may grow infinitely quieter, is a beautiful symphony of color that will always echo. I’m a big fan of entropy.