Mark Sheeky Artworks

Empathy, Entropy And The Ocean Of The Universe

There was a comment in the film Three Colours: Red about the dissipation of guilt when helping an injured dog by taking it to a vet, that this was of more emotional benefit to the helper than the dog. This made me think that perhaps the emotion was as good for both the dog and the helper, and that all emotions represent a dialogue, always something shared rather than experienced by one party.

This made me think that guilt, love, hate; all feelings, were essentially two way communications and that both parties feel the same thing, and by communicating, both parties understand a little about the other and move towards feeling the same level of emotion too. I thought perhaps that empathy was an inherent part of all communication and that, over time, the feelings will equate and so subside.

I imagined that these feelings which were passed from one person to another, were then passed from each party to others too, spreading through all of society to gradually settle, in the same the way that the bonds between molecules of water in an ocean communicate their motion, gradually calming the sea towards a smooth, glass-like surface, like a calm lake. Perhaps, I thought, all information works in this way, and that emotions between people on a macroscopic scale, also apply to atoms and sub-atomic structures.

Particles communicate their forces to each other via force-carrying particles, essentially tiny information packets that are exchanged between particles; shared information, as in the emotion example. Perhaps then, particles also exhibit this form of what we think of as empathy.

Over time, entropy increases, that is, the disruptive ripples in the sea will average out to create this peaceful accord and smooth water; yet this doesn't occur in the real ocean of course. The ocean has existed for billions of years, yet is still in turmoil. Each breeze, each motion of the moon, each swipe of a fish's tail will disturb it. It seems that the real universe is too big and too complex to actually calm the real ocean, no matter how much the water particles try to average out their movement.

Perhaps the ocean will eventually settle, given enough time, but I don't think so. The mechanism here is that any two molecules which communicate will average out their information, so causing a gentle 'sanding smooth' of the information, a tiny move towards equality, yet in the vast universe there will inevitably be sections that cannot ever communicate with other parts due to distance.

The speed of light limits the speed and range of communication, and if any-one part of the universe cannot communicate with a single other part, then pure equality, complete entropy, is impossible, and the ocean of the universe could never settle into the state of a smooth lake, even if small puddles could.

If so, then the universe as a whole, due to its scale, cannot die a perfectly smooth death. Entropy can only maximise in a small, closed system. The open nature of the universe, due to limitations in the speed of light and ability to communicate, will limit the growth of entropy.