Saturday was Harry Potter day, which means I put on my “bad librarian” hat and bought the book first thing in the morning. Just before HP7 was released, I got a copy of Everything is Miscellaneous in the mail (thanks, Tim!) which has been tempting me even in the middle of Harry-mania.

EiM is clearly going to take a little longer to read then HP7 (Saturday 9pm, since reading HP seems to be a competitive sport) and I’m only a little way in. However, I’m having flashbacks to my high school self and my adolescent obsession with entropy and chaos theory. “Digital disorder” isn’t as terrible or surprising as Keen or Gorman might have us believe; one could argue that it’s inevitable:

One way to summarize the second law of thermodynamics is to say that disorder increases. In this context, “disorder” has a specific technical definition which is often stated in terms of the temperature and energy of a system. In physics, this kind of disorder is called “entropy.” A good simple way to think about entropy is randomness. For example, if you have 10 white balls and 10 yellow balls and you throw them into a box at random, it is likely that the colors will be pretty well mixed together, and unlikely that all the white balls will be at one end and all the yellow balls at the other. The reason the disordered state is more likely is simply a matter of statistics; there are many combinations of positions of the balls which look disordered, and only a few which look ordered. The second law of thermodynamics states that over time, systems tend to go into disordered states. If you start with many boxes of balls, some in ordered states, and other in disordered states, and shake them all around for a while, they will probably all look disordered in the end. In other words, entropy increases. (Order and Disorder: Classical and Romantic Physics in Arcadia)

Trying to delineate experts versus amateurs or professionals versus self publishers is just ordering those balls in boxes. Every time there’s an academic scandal where an expert is found to be faking research or a breakthrough from an unexpected source, those boxes get rattled up and entropy (or miscellany) increases. In other words, the structure of scholarly study and publishing is a facade imposed on the natural disorder of the world and while it may help us navigate the world, it’s far from fail-safe and it certainly isn’t self-evident.

The real danger of randomness isn’t the lack of order, it’s the caving to inevitability:

Finally, think about the implications of the second law when applied to all the atoms in the universe. Once again consider the color of the balls to indicate temperature. Then the implication is that the temperature at each location in the universe will eventually even out, although the eventual temperature might actually be something we would consider cold instead of hot! The point is that as the heat spreads out and entropy increases toward its maximum, what is left? Maybe maximum disorder means that nothing interesting ever happens again. (Order and Disorder: Classical and Romantic Physics in Arcadia)

Human nature stops entropy in the world of ideas and information. We like imposing structures on our thoughts; one of the common improvements in search engines and databases lately has been to divvy up results for search terms that fall into several areas of interest (Tim’s “leather” example being the one that springs readily to mind- are you looking for a craft or erotica). We’re not quite mentally equipped for maximum randomness, which saves us from being uninteresting. Here’s to our limits!