The other month I read that the earth’s rotation around its own axis is slowing down by about two thousandth of a second every day and so every few years an atomic clock based in Germany updates clocks all around the world by one second.
At junior school in the nineteen forties I was told the earth was slowing down. My Teacher said the ancient Greeks had noticed that all things decayed and eventually stopped, and that they called the process Entropy.
The concept of entropy was further refined around 1868 when Rudolph Clausius, a German physicist concluded his definition of the second law of thermodynamics by saying that, “Entropy always increases with time.” Nowadays one might possible say, “You can’t stop it stopping.” In 1842 The Scottish Anglican hymn writer Henry Francis Lyte also noticed it and penned the words ‘Change and decay in all around I see, Oh thou who changeth not, Abide in Me.’
My early school teachers included my Great Aunt Mary and she told me that the earth had been molten until its surface cooled, at which point water, vegetation and simple life forms came into being. She also said that the early atmosphere was full of nasty gases and that air temperatures had shot up and down for millions of years. At both school and chapel I was then taught that humans were the last life form to appear and I remember thinking how remarkable it was that both the writers of the Old Testament and the Greeks had got the big picture and sequence of events spot on.
Since those early years I have concluded that there really is nothing new and, although technology does change much, it works with material that already exists. Understanding this helps me to stand aside from those folks who rush around saying we are all doomed because of this or that. Am I alone in noticing that such folk think they have the answers and that these answers usually involve higher taxes and more research?
But, back to the Greeks; we owe our civilisation and much of our way of thinking to the Greeks and they still know something about democracy. This was shown in July when they voted Okhi (No) to austerity – at least some say that’s what it was about, – others say the vote was a reaction to being told by Brussels how they should organise their own priorities.
The final result in true Euro fashion was an expensive Belgium confection called Euro-Fudge and, like all fudge, will eventually melt away, however, some of the grand EU ideas will hang around until they are replaced by others and, it is to be hoped that will not include a caliphate.
I mentioned the word entropy earlier, and should some readers find the writings of the Old Testament and Ancient Greeks a bit depressing cheer-up! The Jews and Greeks who wrote the New Testament are full of hope and optimism. For example, I cannot remember exactly where I read it but the phrase, “Man is that he might have joy,” is stuck in my mind and always brings a twinkle to the eye and a spring in the step.
Talking about twinkles to the eye, entropy and how some folk do their best to rob us of cheerfulness and hope, reminds me of Amos a wealthy but spritely seventy year-old widower from the mountains of West Virginia.
One day he showed up at the Country Club with a fabulously beautiful twenty eight year-old brunette who knocked the socks off all the members, but she had eyes only for Amos and hung onto his arm devouring his every word.
His friends could not believe their eyes and, when he introduced her as his wife, they were stunned and could not understand what she saw in him. They agreed he must have knocked twenty years off and so eventually asked him how she had been persuaded.
“Well” he said, ‘when she asked my age and I said ninety she did seem a bit surprised but said yes anyway.”
View from the Pew 