The concept of entropy (the dissipation of available energy) was the brainchild of the German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822–88) who, in 1850, formulated the second law of thermodynamics (that heat cannot of itself pass from a colder to a hotter body). In any closed system, Clausius pointed out, there is an inevitable waste or loss of energy (entropy), and the amount of energy available for work will decrease as entropy increases. Regarding the universe as a closed system, he predicted that its entropy would eventually be maximized, i.e. that it would run down, reaching a state of equilibrium and uniform temperature, with no further energy available for doing work – a condition known as ‘the heat death of the universe’. The American novelist and poet John Updike (b.1932) protests against this conclusion in his ‘Ode to Entropy’:
Some day – can it be believed? –
in the year 1070 or so,
single electrons and positrons will orbit
one another to form atoms bonded
across regions of space
greater than the present observable universe.
‘Heat death’ will prevail.
The stars long since will have burnt their hydrogen
and turned to iron.
Even the black holes will have decayed.
Entropy!
thou seal on extinction,
thou curse on Creation.
All change distributes energy,
spills what cannot be gathered again.
Each meal, each smile,
each foot-race to the well by Jack and Jill
scatters treasure, lets fall
gold straws once woven from the resurgent dust.
The night sky blazes with Byzantine waste.
The bird’s throbbling is expenditure,
and the tide’s soughing,
and the tungsten filament illumining my hand.
A ramp has been built into probability
the universe cannot re-ascend.
For our small span,
the sun has fuel, the moon lifts the lulling sea,
the highway shudders with stolen hydrocarbons.
How measure these inequalities
so massive and luminous
in which one’s self is secreted
like a jewel mislaid in mountains of garbage?
Or like that bright infant Prince William,
with his whorled nostrils and blank blue eyes,
to whom empire and all its estates are already assigned.
Does its final diffusion
deny a miracle?
Those future voids are scrims of the mind,
pedagogic as blackboards.
Did you know
that four-fifths of the body’s intake goes merely
to maintain our temperature of 98.6∘?
Or that Karl Barth, addressing prisoners, said
the prayer for stronger faith is the one prayer
that has never been denied?
Death exists nowhere in nature, not
in the minds of birds or the consciousness of flowers,
not even in the numb brain of the wildebeest calf
gone under to the grinning crocodile, nowhere
in the mesh of woods or the tons of sea, only
in our forebodings, our formulae.
There is still enough energy in one overlooked star
to power all the heavens madmen have ever proposed.
Source: John Updike, Facing Nature: Poems, London, André Deutsch, 1986.