September 18th, 2025
This is one of the most important concepts in physics and it is little understood outside the physics community. I shall not attempt to explain all the nuances of this law; that would require a large book. Instead, I will provide here an explanation of one aspect of the Second Law that bears on the primary thesis of this hyper-essay.
One way to understand the Second Law is to think in terms of “states of a collection”. Contemplate a collection of four coins:
There’s nothing noteworthy about this group of four coins, is there? Three heads and one tails. Big deal. Here’s another collection of the same four coins:
Wowie, zowie. Two tails and two heads this time. Nothing to write home about. But what if you came across this collection:
This would definitely get a second glance. It is, after all, somewhat odd that they would all be lined up neatly with four heads. Somebody must have set them up this way, you would guess.
Here’s a different way to think about these four coins. This list shows every possible arrangement of the coins.
There are six ways to get two heads and two tails. There are four ways to get three heads and one tail, and four ways to get one heads and three tails. But look — there is only one way to get four heads and one way to get four tails.
So think of it this way: if we put the four coins in a box, shake the box well, and look inside, there are 16 different ways that the coins could fall, and out of those 16 different patterns, only one produces all heads. If you shook the box and it came out all heads, you’d be surprised. If you shook the box again and once again got all heads, you’d be suspicious that something was rigged. And if you shook the box a third time and got all heads, then you’d be sure that this box was somehow rigged to produce all heads.
But now let’s reverse the situation. Let’s suppose that you have an honest box and coins, and you carefully set it up with all heads, then put some stress on the box by giving it a shake. Do you really think that you’d still have four heads in the box? Of course not! You’d probably see something quite different. There are always more ways to get something random than something special.
Complex structures
Let’s now apply this principle to human life. The human body is an extremely complex structure. Let’s imagine carrying out an experiment with a human body analogous to our experiments with the box of coins. “Shaking up” the human body would correspond to putting it into a blender, pouring the bloody mess into a barrel, and shaking up the barrel. How many times do you think you’d have to shake the barrel before the bloody mess assembled itself into a human body? Careful mathematical analysis shows that you would have to shake the barrel a zillion zillion zillion times before you got a functioning human body. There are a lot more ways to rearrange a human body into a bloody mess than there are to rearrange it into a working human. To put it another way, there are a lot more ways to kill a human than there are to save a human. Any fool can kill a human with guns or arrows or knives or rope or poison or swords or clubs or acid, but it takes a team of highly trained professionals using expensive equipment to save an injured human. And it’s all because human beings are such complicated structures.
Civilizations are less complicated structures than human beings, and simple civilizations have some resilience. But the more complicated a civilization is, the more fragile it is. For example, around 1200 BCE, a series of disasters struck the civilizations of the Near East. There were earthquakes, droughts, and invasions from a nasty set of barbarians whom the Egyptians called “the Sea Peoples”. These people were like a combination of the Vikings, the Huns, and the Mongols. They ranged all over the Near East, killing, burning, and destroying everywhere they went. They destroyed the Hittite civilization and every thing along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean except for Egypt, which just barely fought them off. It took only about 200 years for the civilization in that area to recover. This was fairly simple Bronze Age civilization.
The Roman Empire was a more advanced civilization than the Bronze Age civilizations of the Near East. It had some impressive technology, a well-developed bureaucracy, a well-organized military, and an extensive collection of laws. When it collapsed around the fifth century CE, it took perhaps five hundred years for European civilization to recover to a level comparable to that of the Roman Empire.
Modern civilization, however, is more complex than medieval civilization, and this complexity makes modern civilization less resilient than older civilizations. That lack of resilience is demonstrated by the vulnerability of civilian populations to disruption in war. Modern populations are dependent upon the complex logistics systems that their civilizations have developed. In World War II, millions of civilians died, not from bombs or bullets, but from disruption of food and medical supplies. The Israeli attacks in Gaza have killed tens of thousands due to the blockade that prevents food and medicines from reaching the people. An enemy could wipe out American civilization with only a few dozen nuclear warheads; by destroying the centers of commerce and transportation nets, they could deprive hundreds of millions of Americans of the food and medical supplies they need to survive.
Let’s consider how our civilization supplies food to its members. The farmer grows the food, but to do so he needs seed that he buys from the seed company (farmers don’t keep stocks of seed on hand). He also needs diesel fuel and gasoline for his machines; spare parts for when they break down; an expert to help repair them; extra workers at various times during the year; fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides, as well as the equipment to spread them; lastly, trucks to haul off the harvest at the end of the season.
But that doesn’t get the food to anybody. The trucks take the harvest to a storage site (a silo in case of grain) where it is kept to await more trucks, or perhaps a train, to haul the harvest to the processor plant. Of course, all those trucks need diesel fuel, oil, and repairs, just like the farm equipment. So does the train. At the processor plant, the harvest is crushed, cooked, ground, or otherwise made into a base food element, like flour. Let’s not forget the power and other stuff that the processor plant needs. Next, the flour (we’ll stick with flour) goes to a bakery where it is combined with other materials, like yeast and preservatives and water, then baked into bread. Ta-da! We have edible food!
But it’s still not in anybody’s stomach. Now the bread has to be packaged in its special little plastic bag to keep it fresh. Where do you think they get the plastic bag? Those things don’t grow on trees. Plastic bags trace their ancestry through several factories, the first of which is a petrochemical plant. Getting food to people is a complicated business.
Once the bread is in its plastic bag, we have to pile the loaves of bread into boxes, load the boxes onto trucks or trains (MORE trucks needing MORE diesel!) and haul it to a distributor’s warehouse, where it must be unloaded and stored. A short time later, we load the bread into another truck that takes it to the grocery stores, where somebody else has to unload it and stack it on the shelves.
We’re STILL not done. When you want to eat some bread, you have to go to the store (and you’re probably not going to walk), put the bread in your basket, and then pay the cashier, using a system of payment that works for everybody.
That’s a long, long, chain of steps, and if a single step in that chain is broken, you starve. Do you think that such a chain can survive even a small nuclear war?
Every civilization is like a house of cards. Primitive civilizations are like a house of cards that’s only one story high; the more complex a civilization is, the more stories there are in its metaphorical house of cards.
The more complex the civilization is, the more easily it can fall apart. Do you think that we could survive a complete loss of the Internet? Your credit cards and smartphone purchasing apps would be useless; you’d need hard cash to buy anything. How much cash have you in your home?
There are a million ways that a civilization can collapse; there are only a few that can keep it alive. All because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is not confined to planet Earth.