Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

It is an unavoidable fact of life. It is part of the very
fabric of the universe, of our physical reality.
One of the first things that you learn in college chemistry
courses is the basic Laws of Thermodynamics, of which there are
three. But it is the second that is of actual importance here,
at least for me. This Second Law deals with the concept of
entropy. It states that systems move from a state of order to a
state of chaos. As Dean Black defines it: “[E]ntropy isn’t so
much a process as a measure of disorder. The higher the
entropy, the greater the disorder” (25). Furthering his
definition, he writes: “This drift towards chaos – toward
entropy – is what happens when things get left to themselves.
[…][A]ll physical processes tend irreversibly to move in one
direction – from a state of higher order to a state of lower
order” (25). It is the natural way of the universe. The
epitome of this process is the progression of natural existence
from life, the very definition of order, to death, the very
definition of chaos. Be this as it may, it would seem to have
been the mission of Western science and medicine, at least until
the dawn of the “post-modern” age of Western world and the
epochal arrival of Albert Einstein’s theories of Relativity and
Quantum Physics and the like, to reverse this Second Law of
Thermodynamics: to transform chaos into order. For Black, such
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