You might think—as the earth rots with the weight of humans on this precarious ball teasing a self-induced armageddon, and, at home, an American dismantling of democracy—that life’s natural tendency is toward entropy. That it all ends in chaos.
But when I look at the patterns of nature, the spirals of Fibonacci number sequences that form as if by elegant magic in every pinecone and round of petals and from the micro of snail shells to the macro swirl of galaxies, I think of a competing, if possibly more conceptual and comfortable, impulse of ectropy. The path to order.
In my own existence, the older I get the more inclined I am to love organization and prefer each item paired with its own designated container. Rather than organically winging it which seems to me like a recipe for disaster, nothing pleases me more than a well-arranged spreadsheet and a checklist getting reduced. But which is more prevalent in science? Is there a balance or a preference between assembly and destruction? What is the more “natural” inclination? Is there any room for fitted bedsheets in the secret code of all things?
I remember so distinctly the time in my childhood when they was still the question if the universe was open or closed, expanding or collapsing—and yes these were the topics of our dinner conversations, fueled by shows like Nova and my dad’s subscription to Scientific American magazine. What thrilling possibilities in exploring this barrier to the unknown, how will they ever determine its edges or lack of edges and what will it mean for our notions of infinity or importance? How small in the scheme of things were my brother and I. And then one day, we were rendered ever tinier: the universe is indeed expanding, and not only that but the expansion is accelerating. In the same way it feels as if our technological leaps are surpassing us at an ever-quickening pace. Is that a pattern or a problem, and will other elements we can’t fathom (dark matter/energy) and the powerful suck of gravity, pull the messy universe back into some discernible shape someday?
I was curious if for every entropy in nature there is an equal opposite ectropy, could that be the counterpoint of the ebb and flow of this circle of cycles, or is there even such a thing.
ECTROPY OF ART
For a term that can barely be found in science, there is at least some “art” on the matter of ectropy. There’s this little funky movie I found:
Director Jordan Schulz’s short film (20 min), Ectropy: Chaos to Order, as blurbed in IMDB:
“ECTROPY” follows the Artist, a member of the Timeless Presence species who struggles to see his potential. Aided by the young Gaia, the Artist faces existential challenges and immense pressures as they paint the fabric of nature.
and shown here in the trailer.
This Ectropy film starring the “Artist” is no standalone but just the first of a trilogy that proceeds to creation and ends in entropy, from PRWeb.com which calls it a “cinematic masterpiece” but admittedly is just quoting the movie’s own press release:
“Ectropy” is an exploration of the universe’s explosive genesis, drawing inspiration from The Big Bang Theory. The narrative unfolds as the enigmatic “Artist,” tasked with shaping the cosmos, encounters Mother Nature in the mystical days of the universe’s infancy. Together, they embark on a profound journey of self-discovery and creativity, highlighting the interplay between creation and Creator. [Artist Daniel] Winn’s philosophy of “Existential Surrealism” profoundly shapes the thematic essence of the film. Rooted in Winn’s artistic background, the approach examines life’s fundamental questions and the nature of existence itself.
Trilogy Context:
“Ectropy” is the first of the series, and prequel to, the award-winning short film entitled “Creation,” which serves as the second installment. The trilogy is slated to conclude with “Entropy from Order to Chaos,” expected to go into production in 2025, which will depict the inevitable decline back into chaos and complete the cycle of cosmic existence.
Despite what feels here like purple prose in a woo woo English essay, it’s not words that matter in this series. Among praise for “cosmic symphony,” “cinematic brilliance,” and “maestro of visual storytelling…that surpasses conventional storytelling methods,” the writers describe a unique multi-sensory weave of images, sound and music with no dialogue. I’m reminded a bit, at least when I read this, of the work of Darren Aronofsky in The Fountain and its tree of creamy regenerative life.
From 37Magazine,
Winn’s philosophy uses visual language to explore the concept of duality, emphasizing that the absence of opposing factors would render our existence meaningless. His approach seamlessly blends fine art, sculptures, painting and film that delves into the profound questions about the meaning of life and the intricacies of human existence. His art is known for its deep philosophical underpinnings that weaves in deep concepts of existentialism, metaphysics and the human condition.
All of this artistry seems to exhibit the artist attempting control of the uncontrollable. No matter the premise of the movie ultimately moving toward chaos, the artifice of the enterprise of conveying that theme prevails. Man and movie is the organizing container, documenting the chaos in an attempt to fathom it and, at the least, making pretty treatises about it in images, music, or words.
ECTROPY IN SCIENCE
Ectropy is a fairly new concept and there’s very little of it to be found, at least on the Internet. According to a tiny bit of research posted at the Georgia Institute of Technology:
The word “ectropy” means a general increase in organization. It appears to have been developed by Willard V. Quine in response to the Twenty-first Anniversary Symposium of the Council for Unified Research and Education in 1969. Specifically, the term is described:
“This term was suggested by W. V. Quine in discussions following this symposium: Entropy, he pointed out, is Greek for turning in; the opposite term should therefore be the Greek for turning out, namely ectropy. Since the coaction cardioid literally turns in and out of the circle of reference, his short, elegant term is used throughout.”
The above quotation appears on page 83 of the following source:
Edward Haskell (1972). “Generalization of the structure of Mendeleev’s periodic table,” In E. Haskell (Ed.), Full Circle: The Moral Force of Unified Science chapter 2, (pp. 21-90). New York: Gordon and Breach.
That book is an expansion of the aforementioned 1969 symposium. The term “ectropy” is used in several places in the book and is contrasted not only with “entropy” but also with the coined term, “atropy,” which is used to describe circumstances in which the degree of organization remains constant.
IT ALL ENDS IN ENTROPY
Entropy seems to be the basket that science puts its eggs or in, or more specifically physics. Rather than a mix of ectropy (order), atropy (stasis), and entropy (disorder), they calibrate the spectrum between organization and disorder as just more or less entropy. From FS Blog:
Picture your bedroom. Neat and organized? That’s low entropy. But leave it alone, and chaos creeps in—clothes on the floor, papers everywhere. That’s entropy increasing.
This tendency towards disorder is a fundamental law of physics. It’s why:
Ice cubes melt in your drink
Hot things cool down
The universe slowly evens out its energy
Here’s the kicker: Disorder is not a mistake; it is the default. Order is always artificial and temporary. Disorder happens naturally, while order takes energy. Left on its own, the universe tends toward chaos. Your house doesn’t clean itself—it takes energy and effort to maintain order. Stars burn out, structures crumble, and ice melts.
In The Great Mental Models, volume two, we write, “Entropy is the universe’s tax on time. The constant battle against entropy is the driving force behind much of what we do. The constant struggle between order and disorder is the source of change and progress.”
Entropy was conceived much sooner than its counterpart ectropy by Rudolf Clausius, German mathematician and physicist, in the 1800s:
Clausius studied the conversion of heat into work. He recognized that heat from a body at a high temperature would flow to one at a lower temperature. This is how your coffee cools down the longer it’s left out—the heat from the coffee flows into the room. This happens naturally. But if you want to heat cold water to make the coffee, you need to do work—you need a power source to heat the water.
From this idea comes Clausius’s statement of the second law of thermodynamics: “Heat does not pass from a body at low temperature to one at high temperature without an accompanying change elsewhere.”
Clausius summarized the concept of entropy in simple terms: “The energy of the universe is constant. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”
We can even measure time, not according to the positive march of our increasing wisdom and experience, but by the dismal accrual of our unraveling:
The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.
_Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Does anyone else find this terrifying? That according to our contemporary geniuses like Hawking, the tendency naturally is only ever toward increasing disorder?
Could it be some meaning of life, however arbitrary, to find the meaning of life amidst this mess and meaninglessness, to impose order where maybe there isn’t any, to use this energy to impose some semblance of good? To make art and find beauty? To invent religion and play with rules? To invent concepts like “good” and “beauty”?
Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary.
Does that seem sad or pointless? It’s not. Imagine a world with no entropy—everything stays the way we leave it, no one ages or gets ill, nothing breaks or fails, everything remains pristine. Arguably, that would also be a world without innovation, creativity, urgency, or need for progress.
When people talk about eternal life in heaven, or immortality in general, that’s what I think of. Excruciating boredom. I’d choose death if given the chance.
In The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick writes,
Organisms organize. … We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order… We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit … Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells, and carapaces, leaves, and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways—miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.
Where do you fall on the spectrum between organized and disorganized? How much do you try to control?
Perhaps, along with religion’s “heaven” and a romantic comedy’s absurd ability for every bow to be tied, every Jack to get his Jill, ectropy itself might fall in the basket of endearing human inventions designed to simply soothe us on this dizzying ride to oblivion.
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It's got to be both. Entropy *and* ectropy. Right? Yin and yang. Order finds disorder which finds order etc. and all over again. I wouldn't have even had to consider this, and it shocking to me that smarter people than me do (not thinking about you, Krista, though you may be smarter).