Only entropy comes easy – Anton Chekov
In a quaint BBC Radio 4 short, comedian Robin Ince (co-presenter Infinite Monkey Cage) provides an entertaining insight into Murphy’s Law. After a review of Murphy’s Law (and a brief mention of Sod and his law), Ince tells of an equation that purportedly actually computes the probability of something going wrong, which shall not detain us here as it is of no interest.
As a reminder, Murphy’s Law boldly states that: “if something can go wrong, it will.”
There was, however, sadly no mention in the program of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy, which one would think should have something to do with things going “right” or “wrong”. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder, and the Second Law states that the overall disorder of a (closed) system, its entropy, will always increase. This is why earphone cables somewhat infuriatingly tangle rather than spontaneously wind themselves neatly in your pocket, and indeed also why cathedrals and mountains are eventually reduced to rubble. We view such events as undesirable, and so attach to them a negative value captured in our notion of “disorder” (tangled cables, or piles of rubble strewn around where formerly there was a cathedral). Ultimately this disorder relates to our notion of things “going wrong” (the cathedral actually collapsing, or the more traumatic event of finding the earphone cable tangled every time).
So on this reasoning, something “going right” usually means – and is another way of saying – “the imposition of order”, which in turn is another way of saying “limiting the number of ways something can be arranged”. Whereas, on the other hand, something going wrong is our failure to limit the number of ways something can be arranged in a manner that suits us. So for example, it’s difficult to keep an earphone cable from knotting itself because there are many more ways to knot it than there are to organise it in a way that (to us) is tidy and ordered. And any one of these different ordered ways of arranging it require some expenditure of energy and, ultimately, costs us effort. Whereas the many disordered ways of arranging the cable (or ways that to us are not useful) require less energy and therefore happen more frequently, and for free.
So, given that an input of energy (or effort) is required to bring about a more ordered state (equivalent to something “going right”), it is therefore more likely that things will remain in, or degrade to, a less ordered state (things “going wrong”). That, in effect, is Murphy’s law.
Just make things even clearer, alternatively and equivalently we could state that given there are many more ways to arrange something in a disordered manner (something going wrong) than there are to arrange it in an ordered manner (it going right), things will on the average be more wrong than right – unless some effort (energy) is expended in making them “right”.*
(It would be a delight if a physicist suffering from a bout of otium and straying on to this page might offer an interpretation of the above.)
As a final observation, Murphy’s Law is one of the few if not the only law that is self-protecting: if something should fail to go wrong, this is not proof that Murphy’s law is wrong, it is in fact proof of the precise opposite: that Murphy’s Law works well, even to the point where the law itself fails to work properly on occasion. This is, of course, paradoxical, but that doesn’t stand in the way of Murphy’s Law.
In other words, Murphy’s law is non-falsifiable and therefore, like Religion, is forever safe from challenge. This is what makes Murphy’s Law a law of human nature and not a law of Nature. And though it is infinitely more entertaining than Religion, it nonetheless stands alongside it, in that its veracity and predictive power are dependent on human value rather than any particular objective fact of reality. As far as objective reality is concerned, nothing ever goes wrong; things just happen and it is us who impose strictures that dictate which ones have gone right and which have gone wrong.
* While it is useful to think of entropy as a measure of disorder, this is not what it is precisely. Entropy is a measure of the number of ways the particles of a system can be arranged (its micro-states), for which value-laden terms such as order and disorder provide no insight. An example of a system is indeed an earphone cable, the particles being those at the quantum level; i.e., the atoms making up the cable. The ultimate system that contains all other sub-systems is of course the Universe, and its entropy is a measure of how all its roughly 10^(80) particles are arranged at a particular instant. Thus, the entropy of the universe a moment ago was less than it is right now, because though we may have possibly imposed order (for example, by confining the number of ways in which an earphone cable can be stored to just one “tidy” way, eliminating all the “untidy” ways), overall the universe has been degraded, because work was required and something – food molecules arranged in a very specific way in an egg, say – had to be scrambled (literally in the egg’s case), so as to provide us with the energy to tidy the cable. This degradation or increase in the number of ways those molecules can be arranged represents an overall increase in universal entropy, given that to produce the egg in the first place the chicken also had to degrade food matter to obtain the energy in which to make the egg, and so on in a chain back to the Big Bang.
The order/disorder definition only makes sense from the perspective of a goal-driven organism. Ordered micro-states (low entropy) are just as likely as disordered micro-states (high entropy) and it is only because we value the ordered states (from preferring a pile of berries in the corner of our cave to having them still on the tree… all the way to tidy kitchens, fridges, and cars and so on, to transporting food from ordered supermarkets rather than having to pick it off trees or run after it), that we consider something as having gone wrong on the occasions we end up with disordered states.