On thermodynamic miracles. And pretentious blog posts.
When I was young, say 12 or so, I used to stand in line outside the school canteen and think. I didn’t have any friends, you see, so I had to think to entertain myself. Usually the thoughts were of tv shows, or books I was reading, even an occasional urge to take part in the football game across the playground. The one constant, however, was my thinking about the line itself.
I don’t recall exactly when it occurred to me, but one day when I was standing out there I realised that someone had to be first. When the line started at the beginning of lunch someone had to be the first person in it, had to be the first person to get their food, had to be the first person to sit down, to take a bite. It seems like an obvious thought, but to me it was amazing that every day someone was first. I thought it mystifying that out of all the possible people joining that line, one of them would be first.
I thought about this every day, eventually ascribing a strange quality to the whole process. I day-dreamed of being the first in line, and the bizarre journey that would occur(I seemed to think that whoever was at the front of the line got some odd reward for their efforts). Eventually, I learned to put these thoughts out of my mind. First was first - it had to happen, and so it did. No strangeness about it at all.
Years later, and I’m reading Alan Moore’s Watchmen. In it Dr. Manhattan, a being so powerful that he loses touch with his humanity regains that sense of wonder at life when confronted with the circumstances surrounding his girlfriend Laurie’s conception.
Doctor Manhattan: Thermodynamic miracles… events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter… Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold… that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.
Dr. Manhattan sees the immeasurable odds stacked against the outcome of Laurie being who she is, and proclaims it a miracle. He declares that although she had to turn out any one of billions of ways, the fact that she became who she is instead of any other option is amazing.
At this point in the book, I realised that when I’d been thinking about the lunch line all those years ago, I too had been wondering at the fantastical nature of the thermodynamic miracle- I just didn’t know that this idea was acknowledged and named by anyone else.
Then I realised that thermodynamic miracles are everywhere - the arrangement of stones on a rocky path, the way a flame flickers on a burning log, even the entire way the world is now could have gone thousands of different ways after the Big Bang, but it didn’t - that is a thermodynamic miracle. And as I realised this, my sense of wonder and appreciation of everything in existence grew, because everything could be so different, but it isn’t.