Sometimes my brain takes me on a wild ride, jumping from tangent to tangent, until I find myself thinking “How did I end up thinking about that?”
I took just such a mental journey this morning, while enjoying the latest offering by the British musical sensation known as ‘Muse’, and their foray into dubstep called ‘The 2nd Law – Unsustainable’.
Those familiar with physics, or theological apologetics, may already be familiar with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: “In a closed system, the level of entropy will never decrease, moving the energy of that system towards thermal equilibrium.”
In plain English, this simply means things will always decay and eventually all the mass and energy of the universe will be so evenly spread out that there will be no life or movement – after all, in physical terms, what are humans but complex concentrates of mass and energy? Scientists refer to this state as the ‘Heat death of the universe’.
This is pretty much what Heat Death looks like. Exciting, right?
Many philosophers and cosmologists use the second law of thermodynamics to argue against a ‘past-eternal universe’. After all, if the universe will eventually suffer a heat death after enough time has passed, and if an infinite time has already passed then, logically, we should have reached heat death by now. But clearly we haven’t because, well, here we are talking about it. Thus, the universe must have come into being at some finite point in the future.
But my brain was not content to dwell on such apparently simple thoughts but instead decided to use the second law to teach me something new about something that has been heavily on my mind of late. Human relationships.
There’s a reason that what was supposed to be a weekly column has been a sporadic and non-regular occurrence. I’m getting married in five days. Trolling twitter and facebook for celebrities saying stupid things about religion has been replaced by suit fittings and selecting menus for a reception. Pontificating on proper philosophical principles (and alliteration) has been replaced by helping move clothes and books into my house, setting up extra furniture, and writing vows.
My fiancé and I have been together for the better part of a decade. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of relationships begin and end. Like any good philosopher, I have trained myself to see patterns and one very big one I see is that the couples who isolate themselves from the outside world almost never survive more than a year or two.
A fundamentally unsustainable system – Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet
There’s something powerful about the passionate ideals of the star-crossed lovers. Parents and friends don’t approve, but what do they know? So the lovers shut themselves off from everyone and focus solely on each other. That candle burns bright, but not for long.
One of the strengths I’ve seen in my relationship is not in the relationship itself but in the other relationships that surround it. My fiancé and I adore our time alone but we have friends we simply cannot do without. There is always extra energy coming into the relationship from our friends, and there is always an outlet for us to vent our frustrations, without increasing the entropy of the relationship.
Dating advice from the world of physics. Well fancy that.
