When Time Stands Still

For those of you who know me, you’ll no doubt be aware of my fascination with the heat-death of the Universe. The idea that someday – some absurdly distant day – the Universe will eventually reach an entropy minimum. A state where nothing will ever happen. Forever.

When I say nothing, I don’t mean “anything interesting”. I mean “absolutely nothing”. You see, without getting into too much detail at this moment, one day, all matter (and energy) in the Universe will transform in one way or another into a homogeneous soup that is the same at every point.

Entropy

Consider of a cup of black coffee. It’s water and coffee particles are mixed through such that if you look at any particular volume of that liquid, you wouldn’t distinguish any separation between the water and the coffee particles. This would be a low entropy system. It’s the same throughout. Now add to it a bit of milk, however, and you’ll see some interesting clouds as the milk slowly disperses. Initially, the coffee and milk are separate (low entropy), then they start mixing together and forming the complex patterns of streams and clouds moving in chaotic beautiful ways (High entropy), then they mix together enough to be one brown liquid (low entropy again).

Another silly example would be a barren desert. It’s all basically a pile of sand and has minimal perturbations in it’s topology. If you were to start planting a patch of greenery into the desert (foolish of you), that patch will grow with time, and will spread slowly in interesting patterns. If you were to fly over the patch in a helicopter, you might observe a similarity between it’s pattern of growth and that of the milk in the tea. It would become a complex dynamic system with high-entropy. If you were to burn that patch down, only ash will remain, and it would mix with the sand and become homogeneous again, thus becoming a low-entropy system.

Without getting too much into what entropy is (maybe in a future post), I hope you’re getting an intuition of what it entails. It’s often called a “measure of chaos“. Usually, the more complicated something is, and the more moving parts and interactions it has, the higher it’s entropy, and vice versa. Life can be full of this entropic cycle of highs and lows (again, in a future post perhaps).

Our little story

From cosmic dust

Our ancestors, us, and our descendants, all life in the (brief of a cosmic scale) period in the middle of the entropy cycle. We are living in the period where the milk hasn’t yet diffused into the coffee. This is why we have stars, planets, cities, and basically everything. This is the reason we have light and dark, and it’s the reason why we have cold and hot.

The Universe started with a bang. Everything was in one place. In fact all “place” was one “place”. It was simpler back then, wasn’t it? With the passage of time, we got cosmic dust. A bunch of particles swimming by themselves in the void. It was still simple, and was beautiful.

To Stars, and their little children

After some time, the dust was attracted into lumps. Nearby particles clumped together forming blobs of dust. Some got big, some got even bigger. Some got so big and dense, they started crushing each other. They made light. And they became stars.

The stars were so big, and so heavy, that the smaller lumps of dust started orbiting them. The stars were also so hot, their light warmed the lumps. The sides nearest the star got hotter, and the side farthest got colder. We got disparity. Things started to happen on these lumps. The heat and cold would affect the matter on them. Things would move, and you would get seasons. Things are starting to look complex.

To Us

Our little earth is one of those lumps of gas. The sun shone on it, heated it, and all sorts of things were set in motion. The hot core swayed and danced, and crushed the rocks into mountains and valleys. Ice became water, water moved, and moved the ground with it. The air flowed from and to, and carried the heat, and water with it. Things got complex.

The rapid changes, and the disparity of heat and cold, jiggled particles around. Some of them even jiggled in just the right way to start making more of themselves. We got cells, we got little microbes, we got plants. Some of them ate the light of the sun, some of them ate the ones eating the light, this gave them the energy to move around, and make more friends like themselves. Some of them ate each other, and some died and fell, within them the energy they so craved.

We came to. We ate the plants, and we liked the energy. We were able to extract the energy from the dead trees at will, we made fire, and we liked it. We hunted the animals who ate the trees, burned them on the wood of the trees, and ate them. We found the long-dead creatures, we dug them out, put them in our cars, and moved around. We even burned some of them up to have a peak outside our little earth. Things got very complex.

But it was all the doing of the sun. The plants ate it’s light, the animals ate the plants, we ate the animals, and we burned the plants. Everything we came to be, and everything we did, was fundamentally tied to the sun. The sun is pretty great, but like all the little creatures on this earth, it too, will one day die. And so will we.

Heat Death of the Universe

Everything our ancestors did, everything we do, and everything our children will do, is fueled by the sun (and other such magnificent bodies). But the sun one day will run out of things to burn, and it will die (and so will the other magnificent bodies). Some of them will explode, some will eat each other, but eventually all of them will die.

Once they all die, there will be no light. There will be no heat. No mountains, no water, no wind, nothing. A thing will stay where it is. Nothing will move it. Everything that has structure will one day dissolve back into the soup which it came from.

We don’t measure time with clocks, we measure it with the movement of the clock hand. What happens when there is nothing to move? How could we confidently say that time has passed? When everything is the same everywhere, and there is nothing compelling one thing to move from one place to another, time will stand still. And it will stay still. Isn’t that beautiful?

The heat death of the universe isn’t the universe dying by heat and chaos, it’s the opposite. It’s where heat itself dies, with it disparity, change, time, and motion. Everything will be the same everywhere, all the time, forever.