entropy
This is a poem I wrote when I was, maybe, eleven or twelve, when I first heard of the second law of thermodynamics:
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I was reminded of it by reading this from Norbert Wiener:
We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat death of equilibrium and sameness. … This heat death in physics has a counterpart in the ethics of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe. In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system. … Like the Red Queen, we cannot stay where we are without running as fast as we can (Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964), 324; quoted by James Gleick in The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), 237).
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