When I worked at the National Science Foundation before retiring in 2015, a recurring theme among NSF Directors was that the greatest challenge facing science today is fragmentation. As fields become increasingly specialized, what is considered common knowledge in one domain often fails to reflect advances in another. This intellectual siloing leads to widespread misconceptions—not just among the public but even within academic discourse. The recent enthusiasm for elevating thermodynamics to a universal metaphysical principle exemplifies this problem.
Entropy Misunderstood: More Than “Disorder”
In K-12 education, students are typically taught that entropy—defined as the logarithm of the equilibrium probability distribution—is a measure of “disorder,” and that the universe is on an inevitable path toward a “heat death,” a state of maximum disorder. This view, while pedagogically simple, is outdated and misleading. It ignores decades of progress in fields such as nonlinear dynamics, complexity science, and artificial life research.
I recall a talk by Melanie Mitchell, a leading thinker in complexity and artificial life, where she demonstrated through simulations how some universes evolve life that not only persists but flourishes over time. When an audience member objected that this outcome “violates the second law of thermodynamics,” Mitchell explained patiently that the law applies differently when considering open, far-from-equilibrium systems. In fact, nonlinear dynamics reveals that universes can evolve toward several possible long-term states:
- A fuzzy heat death in which disorder dominates,
- A frozen or “ice-like” fixed point—highly stable and static, or
- A dynamic intermediate regime that supports complexity and self-organization—precisely the kind of environment where life and intelligence emerge.
Our universe appears to belong to this third category.
Entropy and the Unknown Lagrangian
The assumption that our universe is destined for a simple heat death oversimplifies a much richer and more nuanced picture. Years ago, I published the exact entropy function for a broad class of theories about how the universe might operate (arXiv:cond-mat/0411384). This work underscores a critical point: until we know the exact Lagrangian of our universe, we cannot assert what life’s ultimate trajectory will be. The laws of physics as currently formulated are incomplete. The notion that the cosmos will devolve into a featureless gas may turn out to be one of the least probable outcomes in light of emerging evidence from cosmology and complexity theory.
* Paul Werbos, PhD. is a member of the scientific council of the Alternative Planetary Futures Institute (Ap-Fi)
