Our planet was created from a violent situation if we consider the Big Bang Theory. Since then, it has never been calm, quieter or peaceful. It has always been chaos, disorder, uncertainty, or randomness. In one scientific word, it can be expressed as entropy. The entropy of our world has been always increasing.
However, there is a limit or maximum entropy achievable when there will be heat death. Nothing to worry about. It is far away on the scale of 10 to the power of 107 years.
Think about organizing your room or house nicely, but as the days go by, it becomes disorganized, so entropy increases. On a greater scale, our world faces the increase of entropy in two different ways – one by nature and the other by man made.
Every other week or month, we face natural disasters in different parts of the world. It could be flooding, cyclone, hurricane, tsunami, dust storm, extreme heat, or extreme cold weather.
Because of climate change, arctic ice starts melting and melting of ice results in an increase of entropy.
And there are numerous man-made disasters such as wars. Regional wars were and are everyday events. It is amazing to realize that people do live hundreds of years under this violent situation. We had World War I and II. Our generation didn’t witness those wars, but we studied them in history courses.
Wars are not over. They continue in different formats. Sometimes it feels like they were in the time of the past. Not really, it is now in the present and it will be in the future too. Stephen Hawking said in his book A Brief History of Time, “The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from future, giving a direction to time,” commonly known as arrow of time.
So, time is irreversible, it can only go forward, not backward, thus entropy increases with time.
Like scrambled egg can’t be unscrambled, we age with time and science can’t make it otherwise. We must stick to following the rules of nature. Humans are not immortal. Aging is a time arrow; organ failure will happen, and death is inevitable. But what we can do is develop better medicines or mechanical parts to lengthen our longevity.
Thus, we need to try wholehearted efforts to minimize entropy’s increase by using methodical and organizational steps to circumvent the arising situation.
Tuesday, my coworkers and I heard one of our favorite colleagues resigned from MUW for a better opportunity. Our departmental class schedules for spring 2024 scrambled for a while, but our chairperson notified every faculty member and rescheduled the classes with other faculty. The sudden increase in entropy has been minimized with the best option available in our department.
We cannot prevent natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes or floods, but we can minimize human deaths all over the world. (Death by guns is preventable, for example.)
Because of Hamas, innocent Palestinians are dying in thousands in the Middle East, but should Palestinian lives in the USA be in danger? Three young Palestinian students were shot in Vermont recently, and a Palestinian kid was killed a few weeks back. On the other hand, a Jewish-owned restaurant was vandalized a couple of days back. The US is not a place or should not be a place for hate crime.
The diversity of the USA is well known all over the world. It is hard to believe how humane the US government is! In the past, the US has offered a Diversity Immigration Visa (DV) to thousands of people from different countries of the world. Amazingly, the DV program still continues.
Salute to the US!
Jiben Roy, a native of Bangladesh, teaches chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences at Mississippi University for Women. He writes occasional column in the Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Jiben Roy, a native of Bangladesh, teaches chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences at Mississippi University for Women. His email address is [email protected].
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