Entropy Anthropomorphised

Scientists have a concept called “entropy”. It is, simply put, the amount of disorder in any given system. Compare, say, a Macintosh to a McFlurry. A Mac doesn’t have much entropy, a McFlurry has loads of the stuff.

Things tend to head towards entropy rather than away. It’s easy to make a pile of wires and broken plastic out of a Macintosh, but it’s a lot harder to make a Macintosh out of a pile of wires and broken plastic. Equally it’s quite hard to turn a McFlurry back into its constituent… whatever the hell it is they make McFlurries out of. But you get the idea.

Ancient peoples tended to take big scary natural processes and anthropomorphise them; make them human. Or, more accurately, make them gods.

Thus you had the Gods of Thunder, and the gods of the sun, and the seasons, and the floods. Each job given to a vaguely humanoid personage, so we could blame them for why everything is so crap all the time. The ancient equivalent of a cabinet minister.

The ancients didn’t anthropomorphise entropy, probably because entropy hadn’t been invented back then. They didn’t have McFlurries, for starters.

This is all going somewhere… I think I may have fathered the God of Entropy.

I realise that this is a major claim, but I have proof.

Ever since Tom has been able to move of his own accord, he’s shown a single-minded determination to destroy. Not just chew things, or bash things, or drop things on the floor. I understand that all babies do that. Tom seems to be far more dedicated.

If you make a pile of blocks, he’ll immediately knock it over. If you make a pile of blocks on the other side of the room, he’ll immediately crawl across just to knock it over. He doesn’t do it with a squeal of delight, or any kind of emotion at all. Just a certain grim workmanlike determination. Because it’s his job. Because he’s the God of Entropy.

He has a general dislike for anything being on top of another thing. Our coffee tables are now merely bare centerpieces to the piles of magazines, letters and books strewn around then.

Pass him a toy while he’s seated in a high chair, and within seconds he will have dropped it on the floor, gazing bemusedly over the side to see where it’s gone. Jane claims that he’s simply “testing gravity”, but I’m pretty sure even Issac Newton only lobbed a few things on the floor before he got the hang of it, and he bloody invented gravity!

Tom chucks stuff on the floor because gravity is his friend and weapon. Because he’s the God of Entropy.

Jane and I were admittedly never the tidiest people before Tom came along. But even we stare in wonder at the share scale of untidiness he can muster in a few short seconds of unfettered access to, say, a sock drawer.

It’s because he works at the untidiness. Because, I’m pretty sure now, he is the God of Entropy.

The worrying thing, and I hesitate to tell you this, is that entropy is insidious. Scientists tell us that you can always do work to restore order, but you can never quite get back to where you started. A little bit of energy is lost to entropy forever.

Eventually, entropy will destroy the universe.

I may have fathered the doom of Mankind.

He’s cute though.