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Entropy: Why Life Always Seems to Get More Complicated
Entropy and Second Law of Thermodynamics
Entropy is the natural tendency of things to lose order and become less organized. Left to itself, it will always become less structured. Weeds overtake gardens. People age. Sandcastles erode or get washed away.
Over time, everything deteriorates. This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics and one of the fundamental laws of our universe. The second law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease.
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Key Ideas
Creating stability and order
This insight - that disorder naturally increases over time but that we can use our effort to create useful types of order that can counteract the pull of entropy - reveals the core purpose of life.
You can pull the weeds in your garden. You can clean your room. But because everything in life naturally turns to disorder, you have to use energy to create stability and order.
Entropy explains many mysteries and experiences
When we consider the human body, the atoms that make up your body could be arranged in nearly any combination and lead to no form of life.
Mathematically speaking, the odds are against your presence. Yet, here you are. It is truly remarkable.
The beauty of art
Artists can create a form of order and symmetry that the universe cannot replicate on its own.
The number of beautiful combinations is far less than the number of total combinations. We should treat it as something unique.
Working towards order in the family life
Marriage can fail in many ways - financial stress, parenting problems, interference from an outside party, conflict in core values, lack of trust, and so on. A breakdown in any of these areas can ruin a family.
To be happy, you need some degree of success in each area. Happy families work towards order in all the areas.
Designing optimal lives
You have a combination of talents, skills, and interests that are unique to you. But you live in a larger society that may not consider your abilities.
It is improbable that life is going to grant you a situation that perfectly matches your strengths. You may not be in the optimal culture for your interests. You may be exposed to the wrong subject or sport. Knowing this, you have to take an unsuitable condition and turn it into a well-matched one.
Entropy and Murphy's Law
Murphy's Law states that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.
Entropy explains why Murphy's Law is so prevalent in life. Life can go wrong in more ways than it can go right. What is remarkable is not that life has problems, but that we have the ability to solve them.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
The entropy law
The second law of thermodynamics, the so-called 'the entropy law', it is said to be one of the most important laws in nature. This law states that entropy, which is a measure of disorder in...
Estimating the disorder
The entropy law, or the second law of thermodynamics, has as object of study the disorder within a system. The bigger the system and the more the molecules and atoms within, the more the entropy contained.
The confusing nature of entropy
In big lines, entropy can be defined as a measure of disorder of a system. However, nobody can give more details about its nature, as there have been so many definitions of the term throughout the years. All these definitions vary according to the discipline the term is used for.
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Key Ideas
The Half-Life of Facts
Facts decay over time. And the time it takes to disprove or replace half of it can be predicted.
Data in medicine become half as relevant in 2-3 years. For exact sciences, 2-4 years.
Half life of facts and compound knowledge
If we want our knowledge to compound, we’ll need to focus on the invariant general principles.
Half-lives show us that if we spend time learning something that changes quickly, we might be wasting our time.
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Key Ideas
Self-Control Components
Self-control has two components:
- Our ability to resist temptations
- Our ability to exercise control over our behaviour and emotions. ...
Self Control and Eating Healthy
While it’s obvious we need to exhibit a certain amount of self-control while choosing what we put in our bodies, that is not the whole story.
If we educate our bodies and learn about nutrition, longevity and how our individual bodies function, we could be eating a lot healthier.
The Pleasures Of Life
There is a lot of stuff available for us to do that makes us feel better instantly. Watching TV, going to the beach, drinking alcohol, smoking, and almost every other activity that seems pleasurable to us, giving us temporary pleasure in a jiffy. When we keep doing that, the long term effects are bad, and we feel older, weaker, sicker, while not having any achievement in our lives.
This is a natural process of a slow movement towards disorder, is also the second law of thermodynamics, called Entropy.
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