Negentropy

Negentropy, by Mike Finley c 2002

Negentropy I know it’s an unattractive word, but it is also a principle that may be very valuable to you From about 1986 to 1995, I earned a living writing books for other people. I liked not having to defend my own ego in my writing. Instead I had to defend the client’s ego, which was sometimes worse. One client, whom I will call Christian, stands out for me. He was a very tall Ivy League business professor, whom I wrote several books for. This was during a time when business books depended on gimmicks – The Leadership Skills of Attila the Hun, and so forth. I was tasked with coming up with a gee-whiz concept that would put him over the top on the speaker’s circuit. I came up with the idea of entropy – the physics principle that everything tends toward disorder and decay – as it applies to running a business. I was taken by the notion of depletion, from a philosophical point of view. Things do lean in the direction of chaos. We live, we die. Cars run down. Cells begin to replicate like crazy. Trees fall. Rocks on top of mountains end up at the foot of mountains. And so on. It’s a flatline universe.

I wrote a fine introductory chapter for Christian about the tendency of things in nature, and in commerce, to wind down. I used my customary poor man’s poetic approach. But I made one serious mistake, in Christian’s view. I treated entropy as an imaginative concept, as a metaphor. He wanted me to show, using the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (which governs entropy), how the scientific principle in business was more than a metaphor – that it was scientifically at work at all times – which it wasn’t. He painted me into the perfect ghostwriter’s box: I had to write a text that appealed to dreamy business travelers (they buy all the business books), but I had to build it with heavily footnoted scientific text that would be unassailable by smart-ass book reviewers. “I do not want reviews making a monkey out of me,” he said, waggling his finger. “This book has to be bulletproof!” My heart sank, as I knew then I would never be paid for the month of work I had put in. I certainly had no credentials to write a scientifically unimpeachable book – it’s just not in me. Worse, what he was asking for was impossible because, in fact, entropy does not apply to things outside nature, like selling steel-belt radials on the Internet. So I walked away from the project. But let me fetch some of it back for you right now, thirty years later. Because the principle does have utility, just not of the bulletproof kind. In physics, entropy is defined as energy's deep-seated yen to disperse. It is how nature changes. It is how the universe keeps from being exactly the same all the time. It is about the sun running out of hydrogen. It is about the fact that every living thing dies. It is about every savage instance of energy letting go -- earthquake, house fire, cyclone, tsunami -- and it is about the irrevocability of these changes. Entropy is responsible for everything bad. 4

In business – or in life -- entropy is the monster under the bed no one wants to admit is down there. It's the invisible force that is doing its damnedest to drag you to your death, even as you read these words. It doesn’t announce in advance how it will bring you down. And it's real. The force that physicists first noticed in a cooling oven is in effect whether we bake pies, sell insurance, sculpt statues, or rake leaves for a living. It's is the fading of greatness. It's the decay of intelligence into going-through-the-motions. It's spending more money than ever but not getting your money's worth. It’s loving too much and then having your heart break into a thousand pieces. It can be fast, or slow, or really, really slow. In entropy, coal burns whether you like it or not. It just takes longer if you don’t. Life entropy can strike like lightning, or let you die so slowly, you don’t even think to object to it. Engines cracking. Stars shrinking down to the dot of an i. Dandelions weaving through the crack in your sidewalk. It is whenever anything happens, and you are weaker for it. So don’t kid yourself. You are in business no matter what you do – the business of not dying, of not failing, of staving off decay, staying alive another day, another week, another year. That's your business – your only business. And it's much better to admit it than to ignore it. Because entropy can be fought, but only with tools we call negentropic energy-activating tools that reverse the flow of decline. Negentropy cannot be done with numbers, no matter what physicists say. That’s like taking a knife to a gunfight. Youcannot defeat fate with a slide rule. To combat the sucking sound of entropy, we must do something special. We must change the rules of the game. We must break with conventional wisdom and take scary 5

risks. We must set the old toolbox aside and fashion new tools by hand. Here's where you learn that you are already half of a genius about negentropy, even if you are a little shaky on the dictionary definition. Because you are already combating it all the time, sometimes quite successfully. Good for you! Unfortunately, the rest of the time, it's killing you, figuratively and literally. You have heard of entropy. You know, vaguely, that people use the term to describe a "tendency to disorder." The word entropy itself comes from the Greek for change. It's a concept that took much of human history to come up with, and that we are just getting our minds around today. It's is a unique topic because, from an atomic standpoint, there is no such thing as entropy. It's not matter, made of atoms. But neither is it energy, comprised of waves. Therefore, you can argue that it has no physical existence. You can’t see it, smell it, taste it, or touch it. You can’t put it on a scale and weigh it. You can’t vacuum it up, like in Ghostbusters. But you can’t argue that it's not there, because it's not only there, it's everywhere. And the amount of it in the universe has grown since you started reading this sentence. You can judge its reality by its significance: entropy is the source of the greatest good and most horrible bad in the universe. It explains life. It explains thought. It explains time. But it is really just a frying pan. Put the pan on the burner, and it heats up. Set it on a table, and it cools. Why? Because in 1858, physics experienced its first brush with modernity -a new view of the universe which made the machine view of Newton obsolete. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states: 6

Energy spontaneously tends to flow from being focused to being diffuse. Heat goes out of the frying pan, and into the air around the frying pan. Given time, all the heat will go out, and the frying pan and the surrounding air will be the same temperature. Newton's laws account for many things, but they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t account for this outflow. They don't account for true change, for things happening irrevocably. As we shall see, there are tremendous implications to the frying pan cooling. Four questions need to be asked. 1. First, who cares what happens to a frying pan? The significance of the frying pan cooling is that all energy behaves that way, not just heat. Once focused, it soon loses focus. A volcano erupting. A nuclear power plant generating. A wave breaking. A bullet fired from a chamber. A balloon popping. The abdomen of a lightning bug glowing, then fading. An iceberg breaking off and sliding into the sea. A star exploding into stardust. A neuron, deep inside your brain, firing off an impulse. If you think of the entire universe, from the largest roaring star to the smallest subatomic particle, everything that is interesting is a frying pan. If no energy flows outward from a thing, it isn't doing anything; it isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t important. The brain works when neurons fire a burst of electricity, then contract. Digestion, internal combustion, iron rusting are all examples of the frying pan losing heat. The Big Bang, the moment the existing universe sprang into being, was basically a big frying pan. The puff of energy required for a person to say "I love you" may be just as major, if it's you summoning the effort. 2. So what's this about "greatest good" and "most awful bad"? "The greatest good" afforded us by the frying pan is that it allows energy to flow. Once energy flows, good things 7

happen. Life is not possible unless energy flows from object to object. We ourselves are frying pans, complexes of molecular factories that turn food into energy, and turn energy into work. When we bite into an apple, the energy flows. When we pick up a hammer, the energy flows. When we do anything, whether it is a physical activity or a mental one, the heat from the frying pan moves out of the frying pan. The Entropy law makes quality possible, and history, and change. Our very sense of time is bound up in our subconscious acceptance of the dynamic of energy dispersal. We know, from entropy, that things go forward in a familiar pattern. Energy accumulates and is released. A stone thrown on a pond splashes, makes outward ripples, and disappears as the energy attains equilibrium. If we somehow saw that scene backwards, our brains would cry out, Wrong! Wrong! Because nothing happens that way. Energy always releases and disperses. If you see footage of a diver leaping backward from a swimming pool and standing poised and dry on a diving board, you know you are witnessing a special effect. No diver can do such a thing, because nature does not allow that pattern. Ships do not unsink. Volcanoes do not unerupt. Air doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t rush back into a ruptured tire. Bullets do not shoot back into gun barrels. A kiss can not be unblown. We know that the Beatles are playing backward tape loops on "Strawberry Fields Forever," because no instrument, plucked, plinked, or hammered, can approximate the weird sounds at the end of that song. Things don't "come to a head" unless some powerful and willful (and expensive) manipulation is taking place. This is an important concept: entropy can never be defeated, but it can be manipulated, soothed, negotiated, countered. 8

Its hunger to degrade can be suspended, held at bay. By – negentropy. When we are truly clever, we can actually reverse entropy, and find fresh power in decaying energy. "The most awful bad" is that energy flowing out is scary. Equilibrium may be peaceful, but peace can be deadly. Pick up a hot frying pan and you will absorb its energy into the tissue of your bare hand, and you won’t like it. When the gun shoots the bullet, people can get hurt. The Martian orbiter firing its jets led to the orbiter's destruction. The air bursting from the Firestone tires killed 271 people. The collision of jet planes into office towers killed thousands of people, and left fires burning for months, before "equilibrium" was restored. Death itself is just a way of describing energy flowing out. When the body dies, the temperature drops. All energy outflow, at any level, triggers risk, because (think of a dam bursting) it doesn’t always flow out the way we want it to, or in a way we can control.

Afterword So my book on entropy never was. But twenty years later I got a phone call – from Christian, my Ivy League professor. I had not spoken to him in all this while. “I have a project that I thought you would be perfect for,” he said. I didn’t want to hear about it. Who is a ghostwriter for more than a few years? So I told him. “Sorry, Chris, I am not in that business any more. And frankly, I wouldn’t want to work with you again.” He seemed dumbfounded at that. Why not? “Because you’re crazy, and you did not give me a chance to succeed last time out.” “Hmm,” he said. “I’m sorry you feel that way.” “I didn’t think that made you a bad person, Chris. Just hard to work with.” “Did you hear about my accident?” “No.” “Yeah, I stepped into a crosswalk and got run over by a city bus.” “In Cambridge?” “No, Ithaca.” “That’s terrible. I’m so sorry to hear it. How are you now?” “I walk with a limp, but basically I’m fine. The orthopedic surgeons performed a miracle on me.” “Wow,” I said – “negentropy.”

Kraken Press St. Paul, Minnesota