Curate, connect, and discover
While I still wait for the chance to gather up my buds and get them into the ring of M:tA, I need to keep this place lively somehow. Through that, I've been working on shoring up my understanding of all the different interactions and possibilities--the limits of imagination itself--within the different Spheres.
Yet I always find myself drawn towards Entropy.
It's a neat little sphere in itself. When one thinks of Entropy there are many different branches to take. Chance, Chaos, Death, Fate. The depths of the concept extend far and wide, reaching its fingers into the depths of a universe both visible and unseen. As opposed to something like Life, whose influences remain important and apparent, despite its noticeably small concentration on a similar universal scale.
But that's waxing too much philosophical, and I prefer to be a rock-brained type-monkey. So, instead, I'm applying it to the life of an unfortunate piano-prodigy-turned-gambling-addict. Slowly--very, very slowly--I'm working on fleshing out the test character Gale Huckhowser. Originally, his Concept started out as Lady Luck's Lover (I love alliteration, sue me), as a smooth, suave, southern gambler type who had an uncanny knack for dodging misfortune. Yet the longer it went on and the more I explored the depths of entropy, the more I realized that concept needed more tragedy, more humanity.
So now if I want to get to that smooth, suave gambler aesthetic, coming into his own and cleaning up his act, then I need to trudge through the sacred flaw approach of alcoholism, mommy issues, love, loss, and poverty. Like notes dancing off ivory keys, following the discordant melody of patterened chaos, this fella needs to go through some shit.
It’s a Monday morning. You reach work to find 25 unread emails, a messy house, 5 essays due, a broken coffee machine, and you’re not sure if you locked your door on the way here. And it doesn’t end there. There’s more work piling up! When there’s chaos all around us, it is only natural to feel overwhelmed. What if I tell you, every object (yes, the non-living ones) experiences this too!
Only at a very atomic level. Each task in our mind is a microstate, a unique arrangement of thoughts at that point of time. The greater the microstates, the greater the number of tasks, the greater the chaos. Chemistry defines a microstate as an instantaneous arrangement of atoms or molecules in a system. And just as our task list increases, the chaos increases. Similarly, for a system, as the number of microstates increases, the entropy increases. Entropy is the measure of disorder or randomness or the possible number of microstates a system can have. It’s just chaos, where lower entropy means greater order and less chaos(Friday Nights), and higher entropy means more disorder and more microstates(Monday mornings).
Entropy tends to rise with time in an isolated system, such as an overloaded brain on a Monday. This implies that things naturally transition from order to disorder in the absence of outside input. Now, imagine some Lo-fi music playing in your headset as you work through the e-mails, sipping on the perfect coffee that you ordered, powering through your day. Maybe you even wrote a to-do list, helping you stay organised. Doesn’t seem so bad when an external effort is made. Similarly, in isolated systems, entropy usually tends to increase over time, meaning things usually go from a state of orderliness to disorderliness unless an external energy is put in to maintain structure.
S = k. ln(W)
Mathematically, the Entropy (S) of any isolated system can be measured by multiplying the Boltzmann constant (k) by the natural logarithm of the number of microstates it possesses (lnW). Entropy isn’t a bad thing—it’s just a natural tendency of systems to become more disordered over time, unless energy is added to maintain order. In your case, a little bit of organisation (external energy) can help you manage the entropy in your Monday morning.