Nothing for Nothing

The Ultimate Law

EVERY year, government patent offices receive dozens of proposals from members of the public claiming to have invented perpetual motion machines - devices that will supposedly run for ever without fuel or energy being put into them. No matter how elegant such a submission appears to be, no matter how learned-looking and abstruse are its accompanying mathematical equations, the wise patent office official will not trouble to read it. He will merely return it with a polite note saying that the document contains an error, no doubt putting the sender into a fury. For perpetual motion is impossible. It violates the most fundamental of all fundamental laws of the universe, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, discovered independantly by Lord Kelvin and Rudolf Clausius, which states that every single thing that exists will disintegrate and cease to be, because it must run out of energy.

Everything that has ever been or ever will be, from human bodies to the thrones and palaces of kings, from the solid-seeming Earth to the remotest star in the heavens, all are doomed to destruction by the inevitable loss of heat. A simple experiment will show the Second Law in action. Drop a heavy stone into a flat pond. A tremendous explosion of ripples radiates outwards from the point of impact. It might seem - for a moment - that the ripples will increase in violence until the pond bursts its banks. But the opposite happens. The second ripple is smaller than the first, and the third smaller still. After a minute or so the water is as flat as before. The energy that disturbed it has gone for ever. Many people have refused to believe in the Second Law. Shakespeare has a character say of Queen Cleopatra: Age cannot wither nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Oh, yes it can! For where is Cleopatra now? The ultimate victim of the Second Law will be the universe itself. Stars die and new ones are created. But the energy of the old ones will have gone for ever, gone with the hydrogen that once made them brilliant, and after many generations of shining stars, the stars must become ever fewer in number. Eon after eon, the universe will become darker and colder until, unimaginable ages hence, all the relics of dead stars will have been extinguished. The works of intelligence will vanish and leave no record. What now seems so glorious will ultimately prove pointless. The very atomic structures that held matter together will dissolve. Nothing produces nothing. Is there any hope that the loss of energy can be reversed, that the Second Law will prove just a nightmare from which we will awake with relief? Alas, there is none. As Sir Arthur Eddington once warned radical theorists of this ilk: ``The Second Law of Thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. . . . If your pet theory of the universe is found to be contradicted by observation---well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if it is found to be against the Second Law I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.''