The whole thing began with what seemed like a completely reasonable question in the wee hours of one morning. It was 3:47 AM. You know that time when you’re half asleep but it’s also early enough that you know your alarm will go off in exactly 3 hours and 13 minutes and you think to yourself “what the hell am I doing with my life?”.
Anyway.
I was sitting on my couch, staring at my not-even-close-to-clean living room and I thought: “Is it possible to measure how quickly my apartment falls apart?”
Okay, sure. Normal people would have just gotten up and cleaned their apartment.
But you aren’t reading this if you’re normal. You’re reading this because you, like me, like to live on the scientific edge. Edge of sanity?
Maybe. Scientific edge. The concept had been nesting in the back of my mind all week.
Thermodynamic entropy. Microstates. Quantum jive.
Something, something, randomness. The Universe loves disorder! “How long does it take for everything to go from clean to trash dumpster fire?” I had asked myself days earlier when the idea first occurred to me.
Spoilers for yourself: long enough to conduct a bizarre scientific experiment. It was Saturday morning by the time I circled back to my question. I had woken Mei from a peaceful slumber, thrust a digital voice recorder into her face and proceeded to read her my experimental design while she tried very hard not to laugh at me.
(Best. Wife. Ever.)
“You’re not seriously going to do this, are you?” She asked as I bounded around our living room dragging a laundry basket full of measuring tape and a notebook I dubbed “The Encyclopedia of Disorder”. “Of course not!” I yelled back cheerily as I hurdled over the small mountain of pillows forming what would soon be my control group. “I’m going to CLEAN this room, then measure how quickly it returns to Entropic greatness!” I yelled over my shoulder.
Mei looked at me blankly. “Entropy is not greatness,” she muttered under her breath as she went back to bed. “But YES I am!” I yelled back triumphantly.
“According to the second law of thermodynamics, all isolated systems experience Entropy!” And with that, I had committed myself to what would be a week of me insanely analyzing how messy we tend to get. For those of you not waking up at 3AM wondering about the nature of disorder, entropy is a measure of thermodynamic chaos. Think of it like this: entropy can describe how willing molecules of an ideal gas are to spread out and fill any container they’re given OR it can be used to calculate how messy my apartment gets when left to its own devices.
Our living room was going to become a scientific battlefield zone. And I was going to come in and document every bleeding meter. There are a lot of steps in my method that I won’t bore you with, mostly because they’re infeasible (quantum tunnelling tiny particles of dust?
No way José) or absolutely horrifying (baby monitor hidden in pillow forts to record any movement patterns by my charming sleeping partner?). But I will say that I started with my ENTIRE apartment at maximum cleanliness. Yes, I spent nearly 3 hours cleaning my living room so that I could watch it get dirty.
But cleanliness is SUBJECTIVE, and I am NOT leaving it to some scientists’ arbitrary definition of what is and is not clean. I cleaned my entire living room. And took exhaustive notes and pictures of the pristine productivity.
I divided my living room into seventeen sections, and gave each location an entropy index ranging from 0-10 based on several complicated factors: How far was an object from where it “should” be? What was the angle of that object off of it’s ideal resting position? Did small children live here?
After laying the groundwork, I checked in hourly for the first day, then every 3 hours for the remainder of the week to see how much entropy had increased in each zone. Note: this experiment took place during a massive heat wave. So not only was I watching my apartment fall into chaos, I was doing it while sweating through my Kobe skin towel.
Awesome. Day two of livingroom_entropy gave me enough data to break down my sections further into what I like to call “entropy hot zones” and “stable zones”. Entropy hot zones were places that got especially messy.
Threshold zones occupied the spaces in-between. And stable zones? Stable zones were where shit didn’t seem to move regardless of how many entropy hurricanes wreaked havoc all around them.
Mei’s desk was a stable zone. THE FLOOR WAS A ENTROPY HOT ZONE. All kinds of fun stuff started to pop out of the data in the early days.
I discovered that some items were more prone to entropy migration than others. For example, my phone charger liked to move approximately two meters away from the wall outlet it “lives” at on a frequency of roughly every 18 hours. Coins and dollar bills experienced something I can only describe as quantum tunnelling.
They would simply vanish from countertops only to materialize weeks later in the couch cushions. But it wasn’t until about day four of the experiment that I noticed something troubling in my data. (POOR DATA.
IT WILL NEVER FORGET WHAT I DID TO IT.) My entropy levels in each zone were spiking EVERY TIME I walked into the living room to take notes. Me.
I was introducing entropy into my own experiment. At this point Josh would say I’ve had my “second most unhealthy mental spiral of 2016”. (We’re still waiting for an apology letter from Siri about that whole MRI Machine Incident.)
But if I was altering my living room’s entropy just by observing it, how could I know if I was the cause of all this chaos? Was I the entropy monkey wrench throwing my carefully constructed observations out of whack? The next few days were a whirlwind of frantic science.
I brought in time lapse cameras to remove myself from the observation process. I secluded sections of the apartment that I vowed to never enter nor observe. Eventually I even convinced Mei to force herself to take small detours every time she had to walk through our living room just to make sure her movement patterns wouldn’t unknowingly skew the data.
At the end of seven days I had filled notebooks with numerical data that would make even the stoic number crunchers at NASA blush. masking tape was crisscrossing every square inch of our apartment’s floor. Our walls were plastered in coordinate maps and reminder notes to Self that read: “Increase sliders of entropy influx per hour by √2”.
It was bad. And by GOD did it pay off. After cleaning our apartment again (promise this is the last time I’ll mention that) and digging through the mountain of data I had painstakingly collected (147 pages of excel entries for the people at home), I was able to extrapolate some interesting conclusions about my home and how it transitions from clean to bananapocalypse in only a matter of days.
For starters, my apartment gains entropy at an average rate of 26% per day when subjected to normal household activity. What does that mean? Reading a book increased the entropy of my apartment by an average of 15%.
Trying to find the remote? Big ol’ entropy spike of 43% across all related entropy zones. But worst of all, my very own scientific excursions were causing an ENTROPY EXPLOSION of 70-85% EVERY TIME I sat down to take notes.
I was slowly destroying my own sanity just by trying to quantify my silliness. But wait! There’s more!
I also found that entropy begets entropy. A single shoe left on the floor could, and WILL, lead to multiple pillows out of their couch slots, unruly sheets tossed across the floor, and who knows where the remote will end up. After filling three plastic bins with mountains of raw data (DO I SOUND LIKE A METAPHOR MACHINE YET?
I THINK WE HIT MAX CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS PER EDIT), I had discovered how quickly my apartment transitions from immaculate to aaaand we can’t remember. I wish I could say I learned about myself from this experience. That measuring just how quickly my home falls into chaos somehow enlightened me and my way of thinking.
But I would be lying. What I DID learn was that my apartment falls into entropy at a measurable rate of Σ and my wife was right about me. The toaster is missing.
I am the entropy bully.
Thanks for proving it, Meg! P.S.
If anyone finds a blue sock and half of a measuring tape, I own you each a sock. For the sock. But please return it.
We haven’t lived here in a while.
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