Nature tends towards entropy. At the same time, it is full of patterns and regularities. How is this possible?
One of my favourite literary characters, the moderately heroic wizard Rincewind from Terry Pratchett’s novels, was once terrified to hear that a certain area featured many erratic rocks. The wizard’s anxiety could be understood if we take the word ‘erratic’ to mean unpredictable or even capricious, and not just as a descriptor of a rock that has been transported by a glacier and deposited in a surprising location.
As is usually the case with Pratchett, however, Rincewind’s worries illustrate a deeper issue. We generally feel safer in an orderly, predictable world. Our attempts to comprehend the universe make us so keen to find in it some universal patterns and rules that we often get led astray. Furthermore, if we do manage to find some patterns or similarities, we insist on giving them a deeper meaning, even though so many phenomena around us are either random, or appear the way they do because there isn’t much of an alternative. The veins in our hands, the venation of leaves and courses of rivers are all supposed to illustrate our deep connection to nature. That connection does exist, of course, but is there any other way for them to flow? If many small trickles combine to form a larger one, this is what it looks like; there’s no alternative, and the only thing it illustrates is the behaviour of liquids in vessels.
Photo by Victor Grabarczyk/Unsplash
Ancient pyramids, encountered all over