Unique Moments

Remember those unforgettable moments in you life? We treasure them because their unrepeatable. Unique. And we see this from the emotional side, but science uncovers something special. All moments are unique! The reason is the second law of Thermodynamics.

In all processes of energy transfer and conversion, we always have the formation of irreversibilities. Meaning a part of the energy involved is lost, and it is impossible to recover. Lost?! How? Usually as heat. But the ultimate consequence is another. There's no way back to things as they were.

You can break the glass, assemble the pieces and glue them, or melt them and make an equal glass, but it will always be different. Time has an arrow, like Eddington said, and always moves forward. Therefore, it's this temporal arrow that justifies how each moment is unique.

The consequences of this for our lives are obvious. Every time you make a little, no matter how small, damage to the environment, time doesn't go back, and that damage is irreversible.

Associated with these irreversibilities is a concept essential in the second law of Thermodynamics: entropy. This expresses disorder in a system, which is why in an isolated one, entropy always increases. Our world, our universe which has boundaries (although we don't know for sure) is like an isolated system, so, how is it possible that there's order at all if everything moves toward increased disorder?

The Nobel prize winner Ilya Prigogine has explain in several of his books that under certain circumstances of nonequilibrium, entropy is the progenitor of order, instead of an sign of disorder. Go figure. In fact, there's order out of chaos because irreversible processes are at the origin of order processes associated with randomness, openness, that lead to higher levels of organization, such as dissipative structures. Therefore, what seemed to us as negative has a positive side.

In the preface of Prigogne and Stengers "Order out of Chaos" (1984) it is written there are "aspects of reality that characterize today's accelerated social change: disorder, instability, diversity, disequilibrium, nonlinear relationships (in which small inputs can trigger massive consequences), and temporality—a heightened sensitivity to the flows of time."

Here's my thought. If we live in a world of nonlinear relationships, can we change the world with small acts of love? When we realize the truth of "small inputs can trigger massive consequences", the profound change in our lives that some of us desperately seek is within our reach through small acts of love. We see in social networks several short movies showing this. And I'm sure each one of us has those moments to share. So if you join this with the realization that time has an arrow, thermodynamically, you understand those moments as... unique.

Now is the "moment" to spend less "time" on the sofa, or looking at the world through a small screen. Look around you and be attentive. Think how can you make each moment of your life as science explains them to be... unique. The world around you is a sea of possibilities. Never forget it.