The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics – or why pessimism is a saner state than optimism…

The inevitability of heat death means the world pertains to chaos. In the illustrious words of Lana Del Ray, we are born to die, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something, probably their overly rushed, not quite so great second album.

When I’m not listening to doe eyed, trout pouted, love-obsessed songstresses, I fucking love science. Not in the sense that I can work out an equation, or enjoy mixing a compound, but in the sense that the universe fills me with wonder and dread, and finding out about the whys and wherefores, in the sense of concepts, not details, simultaneously oppresses and releases me.

You know what I mean ? That feeling like when you’re stoned and looking at the constellations in the wrong hemisphere from a beach in Australia. I’ve not done that in a while, btw. Too busy putting the kids to bed and earning a crust…

But watching Professor Brian Cox, all dreamy eyed and factual on Channel Four gets me excited and not just in my knickers. When he describes entrophy, temperature evening out over time and the world becoming ever less ordered he confirms my view of the world: that everything turns to shit sooner or later, and there ain’t nothing we can do about it.

Heat death, says Cox, with his beatific smile and Mona Lisa gaze, is the fate of our universe, and dereliction and rot and ambivalence the natural conclusion to all. It calls to mind the famous quote from Ozymandias, a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelly – ‘”My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains.’*

Sorry to go all intellectual on you, but I did get a first in Eng Lit, and this is my only op to show it off. So there. It’s a fact. All you half glass full optimists (like other half Tom) are just plain stupid. Or so agrees pop philosopher Alain De Botton – If only I could find that darned tweet where he says something like “the inevitability of death means depression is the natural state of the non-dimwitted”, but so much more elegantly and epigrammatically than I possibly could.

However, flying in Cox’s lovely face is the concept of evolution, which rather turns thermodynamics “all turns to shit” theory on its head. Because if order turns to disorder, then why does evolution create order from chaos? Answer me that, you floppy haired electro pioneer yet oh-so-dishy scientist.

Like I say, I’m interested in concepts, not details, and my tourist-level reading of Richard Dawkins suggests life works very much as a computer program: growing ever more sophisticated…but then, I don’t know anything….But maybe, just possibly, Dawkins may prove that life isn’t quite so bleak as Cox would have us believe, after all?

But then, which one would I rather snog on an Australian beach?…Chaos theory every time.

Anyhow, edukate yerselves:

*I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which still survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I also like this one, which I found random Googling for the echo of a poem from my first year at Bristol Uni, half forgotten (so I’m not so clever after all, it seems), which pretty much articulates the stoned star gazing of my misspent gap yar (yes, mum, I did mean to spell it like this – haven’t you seen that video in YouTube? Get with the programme)..:

For I have walked the wild country

And watched the sun slipping slowly down

Turning green to gold

working alchemy before my very eyes

I have seen the mountains

Lifting up their faces to the sky

Gathering in the starlight

So beautiful it makes me want to cry

And I can hear a voice- it’s calling me

Can you hear the voice?

It says;

Look upon my works you mighty and weep

Chris Goan

By the way, I’m tagging all my posts with MILF from now on. Not because I think I’m something special (although having children younger helps garner such a description), but because my traffic has gone up 1000 percent since I tagged a post describing ‘one for the road’ Kate thus. So it ‘s a no-brainer. although whether or not I want a readership made up of horny 14 year olds remains to be seen…