Entropy of Life and Death -DailyWearForMedicine.com

                                            By Ramana Annamraju

Wood burns into ashes. Eggs get rotten. Roads get potholes. The buildings get rusted. We get sick as we get older. The expression 'things always go bad' may be true, even for the entire Universe. The Universe meets its death at the end. It is called "Heat death". That is the Universe we live in.

The question is, why do things progressively go bad? Is there any mysterious evil hand pushing all of us from bad to worse? No, it is not a mystery hand, but it is the "law of disorder ".that is pushing us from bad to worse. This process is scientifically referred to as the second law of thermodynamics. The first law of Thermodynamics is the law of conservation. Energy is neither created nor destroyed.

Thermodynamics is a branch of science that studies the movement of heat between different objects. The second law of thermodynamics looks like a pretty trivial process on the surface. But believe me, this law can send genius scientists into depression. That is exactly what happened to the scientist who discovered this law, he hung himself!

His name is Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), born in Vienna, Austria. This eccentric genius understood the law of disorder and gave us a mathematical formula. With that equation, we can quantify the progression of the disorder. That quantification is denoted as entropy.

Entropy is a measurement of disorder, either increases or decreases for you or me, rocks, or any system. But the entropy is forever going up, never going down for the whole Universe. Entropy is a bookkeeper of the order and disorder like credit and debit ledger. More the disorder, higher the entropy, Less the disorder, lower the entropy,

The progression from bad to worse is a cosmic reality. That kind of reality also manifests in disease progression. For example, cancer starts from stage I progresses to stage IV. There is a correlation between the universal law of entropy and cancer progression. An obscure mathematics professor from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, realized that stunning insight.

His name is Jagat Narain Kapur. He passed away in 2002. He came up with a unique statistical method that bears his name 'Kapur method', where entropy can be applied to living organisms.

 

Mammography is specialized medical imaging that uses a low-dose x-ray system to see inside the breasts. A mammogram is a medical device that creates images of the breast. The challenge is, looking for malignancy is like looking for a needle in the haystack. Radiologists constantly struggled for years to correctly identify cancer. Calcifications in the breasts look very similar to cancer, which leads to unwanted biopsies. Computer-Aided Design (CAD), a software application used in the manufacturing sector, is deployed along with Mammography machines to help radiologists make a correct diagnosis. However, there is still a possibility of misdiagnosis. Breast Cancer detection is one of the most missed diagnoses in medicine.

  Another tool came from a completely unrelated field for the detection of cancer. It came from the world of football. In America, it is called Soccer. A vivid football fan, Computer Professor Navid Razmjooy from Iran, came up with an algorithm to see who will win the world cup. That algorithm, coined as the World Cup Optimization Algorithm (WCOA), is now being deployed to detect cancers. Skin cancer melanoma is top on that list. Entropy measures the disorderliness of a system. Cancer growth is also a kind of disorder. We can make use of entropy mathematics to quantify cancer growth much more accurately.

But it seems cancer remission is going against the second law of thermodynamics. Just life, an ordered collection of molecules, seems to go against the second law. But there is an exception. The second law of thermodynamics or law of entropy allows going from disorder to order in open systems like 'life,' at least temporarily. But there is a trade-off. When we get better from disease, we are doing it at the expense of the Universe. Every order that takes place, we are forever increasing the entropy of the Universe. So life, death, chaos, and order are intrinsically connected to the Universe.

All this happened because of a man named Ludwig Boltzmann from the 19th century.,, He understood the laws embedded in the Universe and revealed them through a famous mathematical formula. He struggled to convince his peers and colleagues about his findings. He battled depression and finally committed suicide while on vacation. We may not know his name, but we owe tons of gratitude to his discovery!

Additional Read: The equation in the diagram is non-intuitive, but its meaning is very profound. In the formula 'S' is the entropy of the total system (a measure of disorder) that can be calculated by the logarithmic function of its microstates log (W) multiplied by the Boltzmann constant 'k'. In math, huge numbers are represented in logarithmic functions. For example, showing the total number of Covid cases in a given month can run into huge numbers. You can not print a million pages. So, Logarithmic functions are used to show on one piece of paper without losing the integrity of the total cases. You can call it scaling down the numbers. example 104 =10,000 Log10(10,000) = 4

10,000 cases you can represent with just simply a number 4

There is another depressing secret behind the second law of Thermodynamics.

Why can you not get younger instead of getting older?. why an omelet won’t reform back into an egg or why billiard balls don’t spontaneously reform a triangle after the break. There are no other laws in science preventing you from becoming younger, omelet turns into eggs except the Boltzmann equation.

Entropy can also be measured through the information available to you. For example, the left side of the teacup has one sugar cube. If you don't want sugar, you can take it away before it melts. , You have enough information about where that cube is. The entropy of the left side teacup is low. Rightside of the figure, the sugar is melted. All the sugar molecules in the cube are spread across the cup. Now you lost track of them, or much more difficult to pinpoint their location. . Your ignorance of the system or lack of information available to you can also make the entropy higher.

Now getting back to the question, why you can not get younger. The secret lies in the teacup. The problem is 'irreversibility'. Once the sugar is melted, you can not get the cube back. This is the only place, the concept of "arrow of time" pops in. So we can not go back. We are always moving forward in Time'. The "irreversibility" of the process created "Time." If there is no irreversibility, there is no 'time'. Lack of information in the process made the "time". It is not just a teacup problem. Cells in your body have the same problem; like everything else in nature.

Another aspect of entropy is tied with the beginning of our Universe. You keep on asking questions, like where you came from, where your mother came from, where your grandmother came from, and so on, and that takes you, all the way to the beginning of the Universe,

Our life journey starts from the beginnings of the universe to all the way to the ends of the universe. That is what Second law thermodynamics says. So you and I and everything else are intrinsically connected with that cosmic reality. Ludwig Boltzmann just explained that reality with an elegant equation!

Thank you for Reading this@!!

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