The Inevitable Entropy Of Elbows

There is a bloke I met down the local cafe — and no, I shan't tell you cafe, there being more cafes in Coventry than there are conspiracies in a Dan Brown novel — who maintains, with the terrible certainty of a Flat White, that the ageing process and the eventual thermodynamic collapse of the Universe are, and I quote him verbatim, "the self-same bloody thing, only one of them happens to your trousers first."

I bought him another brew on the strength of it. A man who can produce cosmology of that calibre before elevenses deserves nothing less.

Consider, if you will, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Not the First, which is dull, nor the Third, which is showing off, but the Second, the one that states that entropy in a closed system can only ever increase. Which is to say: things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and the milk in the fridge will always, always, go off on a Bank Holiday Monday when the shops are shut.

The learned professors of Cambridge and elsewhere, men with beards and grant applications, inform us that in some hundred trillion years or so, the Universe shall achieve what they call Heat Death. All the stars shall have fizzled out. All the atoms shall have wandered off in a mood. There shall be no hot, no cold, no middling-lukewarm-like-a-cup-of-tea-you-forgot-about — merely a vast, uniform, tepid nothing, stretching on in every direction like a Sunday afternoon in Birmingham circa 1974.

And I put it to you, in the manner of a bewigged silk addressing the jury, that this is precisely what is happening to another bloke I know named Cyril.

Cyril, in his prime, was a furnace. A blazing supernova of a man who could drink twelve pints, argue with a policeman, propose marriage to a barmaid, and still be up at six the following morning laying bricks in Portsmouth. He radiated. He shone. He gave off, as the physicists have it, a great deal of energy.

Cyril is now seventy-eight. He sits in a chair. The chair is beige. He is beige. His cardigan is beige. His tea, which he sips at a rate approximating one molecule per hour, is beige. He has achieved, quite without meaning to, a state of perfect thermal equilibrium with the soft furnishings. You could not, with the most sensitive instrument known to science, determine where Cyril ends and the antimacassar begins.

He is, in short, a small localised Heat Death, wearing slippers.

And are we not all Cyril? Are we not all, from the very moment the midwife slaps us on the arse and demands to know what we mean by it, engaged in a slow, dignified, cardigan-clad slide toward maximum entropy?

Consider the evidence, m'lud:

The Hair. In youth, organised. Parted. Combed with intent. In middle age, mutinous, sprouting from ears and nostrils where no hair has any business sprouting, whilst simultaneously deserting the crown of the head like rats from a torpedoed frigate. This is entropy, pure and unadulterated. The follicles are simply redistributing themselves toward a state of maximum disorder, in strict obedience to Herr Boltzmann.

The Waistline. Once a taut and purposeful girdle. Now a diffuse and cosmological expansion, drifting outward at approximately the Hubble Constant. My belt notches tell a tale of universal inflation that would have Edwin Hubble himself reaching for the rum.

The Memory. In youth, a filing cabinet. In dotage, a bran tub at a village fête, into which you plunge an increasingly hopeful arm in search of the name of that bloke, you know the one, was in that thing, with the woman, with the hair.

Even our very stories succumb. I began this column with a clear thesis and a firm grip upon my subject. Observe now how it wanders. Observe how it digresses into the matter of Cyril's cardigan. This column itself is undergoing entropic decay before your very eyes, and by the final paragraph shall likely resemble nothing so much as a shopping list written by a concussed spaniel.

Some cheerful soul will now comment to point out that entropy is only guaranteed to increase in a closed system, and that we, being open systems, may temporarily reverse the trend by, for instance, eating a salad or joining a gymnasium. To which I reply: yes, and the Universe itself is only presumed to be a closed system, and yet nobody I know is proposing that we solve Heat Death by feeding the cosmos a Caesar salad and enrolling it at Pure Gym.

The truth, and there is no shirking it, is this: the Universe and I are engaged upon precisely the same project, only I have rather a head start. In some trillions of years, the last proton shall decay, the last black hole shall evaporate in a whimper of Hawking radiation, and the cosmos shall settle down at last into its beige cardigan and reach for a beige cup of tea.

And somewhere, in some corner of the eternally cooling void, a very very old and very very tired photon shall turn to another very very old and very very tired photon and say:

"Here, my knees don't half sound like a bowl of Rice Krispies."

I'll have another brew. While there's still time.