

I love physics because it’s weird 😊 I’ve watched two awesome physics documentaries (on Amazon Prime) called “Everything and Nothing. The Amazing Science of Empty Space” and “Order and Disorder: The Forces that Drive the Universe”.
My mind has been blown when I learned that emptiness or vacuum is not empty, it is teeming with micro Big Bangs – matter and antimatter appearing for the briefest amounts of time and almost immediately annihilating each other. It is like energy is playing hide-and-seek with itself, shape-shifting, never standing still.
I also learned that it’s possible that our whole existence is a result of one such micro Big Bang not annihilating completely and leaving behind some debris. Imagine – matter and antimatter appearing and disappearing for a while, like an eternity, and then just one time antimatter failing to annihilate the matter completely and one atom slipping away. Ta-da! The Universe is born. Entropy 1 : nothingness 0. Isn’t it exciting?
“Nature does not abhor vacuum. Vacuum is nature’s default state.”
From this point of view, emptiness is creative, a pool teeming with opportunities, options colliding and annihilating. One does not wait for it to pass, one does not learn to go through it, one waits for the right debris while cheering on 😊 Trust the process…
I love quantum physics because it sounds just like Buddhist texts. In “Order and Disorder: The Forces That Drive The Universe”, we learn about entropy, or disorder, a beautiful friend that I was introduced to by psilocybin: “…there are many more ways for things to be messy and disordered than there are for them to be tidy and ordered” and “Disorder is the fate of everything.”
Initially, this seems depressing. It seems to say – eventually we will all die and everything will stop existing. Yes. But also our existence and our lives are in essence finding new, more ingenious ways to surf chaos while shaping it into order. It’s almost like the Universe knows that its fate is entropy, so in the process it created us to play, convert the entropy, the energy of chaos, of nothing into the energy of joy and love.
“Every aspect of the physical universe could be thought of as a blank canvas, which we can use to build beauty, structure, and order.”
Amen to that 🙏
What a lovely post. I have always found entropy a thoroughly depressing concept but I very much like your refreshing approach to it.
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Thank you, Anthony! Indeed. Entropy as a creator, huh? If you are interested in application of this idea to mental health, google Robin Carhart-Harris’s articles on it.
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Ah! how interesting. I have read a lot of robin’s stuff but mostly about annealing. I will chase up his writings on entropy with much pleasure.
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Great post 😁
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