It was really the third law of thermodynamics that got to me, but arrival at that point took a while.

All the old and distorted memories of my childhood paint a pretty naive picture of youthful exuberance and interest in trivial yet complicated scientific topics. Ego played a part: I enjoyed having good grades that were better than my friends’. So obviously it was no coincidence that my interest naturally moved into esoteric topics few knew anything about — it’s easier to seem intelligent when no one can disprove your understanding. And who knows, maybe ego explains why I decided to be a chemical engineer when I was in fourth grade. Memory says it was the salary, but that was over forty years ago so the details are fuzzy.

When I got to college I took thermodynamics like any other junior in Chem E. Our class first reviewed the three basic laws of thermodynamics, but it probably took 20 years for it to really sink in. I mean no one uses that information in the real world anyway, right?

If you care to know more about the third law, Wikipedia has a nice write-up — but, if you’re lazy like me, it says, in a nutshell, that an enclosed system always moves toward greater disarray, e.g. entropy always increases. Now you might be thinking, “what the fuck does that mean?” and I wouldn’t blame you, so here’s an imaginary example to demonstrate:

Let’s say we have an empty box. It is empty of everything, even air — not even gas molecules exist within it — except there is a small magical container inside, and it is filled with oxygen. The oxygen in the magic container within cannot escape or move as long as the little container exists, and the oxygen molecules within this imaginary container are all somehow aligned. It doesn’t matter how they are arranged, only that there is some kind of order. The third law of thermodynamics says that if this magic container holding the gas somehow disappears, the gas molecules will move toward disorder, even without interaction from forces within the empty outer box; it says that rearrangement of the molecules into chaos is a natural phenomenon of their existence.

Now you might think, “who cares?”

Well, consider this: what is life? Generally speaking it is considered the orderly arrangement of matter into something that performs a function. Its key aspect is the “orderly arrangement” part, and paired with thermodynamics, this was a huge problem for me. Why?

If you drew an imaginary box around the entire universe, the third law of thermodynamics says that for every living (e.g. ordered) thing within it, some other aspect of the universe must experience disorder of at least the same magnitude. It means that eventually the universe will work itself into a situation where it is impossible for life to exist because, according to the law, everything moves toward greater and greater disarray. So, sooner or later the universe will at every point be too cold or too spread out for matter to interact and “organize” itself into life — and by then, supposedly everything will have been dead for a long time.

Physics and science in general seemed infallible, so I was willing to reach conclusions and stress out about a future that has nothing to do with me: our science says everything must die.

Depressed yet? I was when I read about things like this. Back then concerns about relatively trivial things like this were huge contributors to the depression I experienced before I woke up. But enventually I realized there’s more to life than scientific endeavors and other human assumptions and I started thinking enough to reach my own conclusions, like there is no such thing as depression and that science is not definitive.