TABLE OF CONTENTS One of Murphy s [1] famous laws states that left to themselves, things will always go from bad to worse. This humorous prediction is, in a way, echoed in the second law of thermodynamics. That law deals with the concept of entropy. Stated simply, entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. The thermodynamics law states that entropy must always increase in the universe and in any hypothetical isolated system within it [34]. Practical application of this law says that to offset the effects of entropy, energy must be injected into any system. Without adding energy, the system becomes increasingly disordered.
Although the law was intended to be a statement of a scientific property, it was seized upon by philosophers who defined system to mean a car, a house, economics, a civilization, or anything that became disordered. By this extrapolation, the law explains why a desk or a garage becomes increasingly cluttered until a cleanup (injection of energy) is initiated. Gases diffuse and mix in irreversible processes, unmaintained buildings eventually crumble, and engines (highly ordered systems) break down without the constant infusion of maintenance energy.
Here is another way of looking at the concept: Mother Nature hates things she didn t create. Forces of nature seek to disorder man s creations until the creation is reduced to the most basic components. Rust is an example metal seeks to disorder itself by reverting to its original mineral components.
If we indulge...
