You’ll get more out of this post if you read my previous article about flunking Physics when I was a Junior in High School. If you haven’t read it, go do that now and I’ll wait for you to get back….

Okay. Welcome back.

While I was waiting for you to return to this page it occurred to me that the activity of “waiting” is not a stationary sport. In fact, let’s try an experiment that demonstrates there is no such thing as sitting still.

Go ahead and plop your butt down in a chair and just sit there for 10 seconds. Ready? Start. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…you know how it goes… ten Mississippi. Okay, stop.

Now here’s a fun fact. During that 10 second sit-still you actually traveled almost 30 miles eastward! That’s because the Earth rotates on its axis about 2.9 miles/second in a west-to-east direction. And you, sitting on this spinning planet, moved right along with it at 2.9 miles/second for a distance of just under 30 miles. Cool, huh?

Okay, now let’s add this:

During those 10 seconds of “sitting still” and traveling 30 miles eastward, you were also moving through space at a breathtaking 186.1 miles/second. That’s the speed at which the Earth orbits the sun. As a passenger on Spaceship Earth, you actually traveled 1,861 miles in that journey around the sun!

Wow! All that in just 10 seconds!

But wait! There’s more!

Our solar system – the Earth and the other seven (or eight) planets that orbit our sun – are part of a galaxy of more than 100 BILLION stars known as the Milky Way. And this spiral-shaped mass of stars and planets are all spinning, sort of like a pinwheel, at a speed of 168 miles/second.

And the Milky Way galaxy itself, with its 100 BILLION PLUS spinning stars and planets, races around space (in relation to other galaxies) at 3728.23 miles/second.

That’s over 13 million miles per hour!

Wonder what kind of gas mileage we get at that speed?

So…are you ready for this?…in that very brief 10-second period when you were “sitting still”, you actually traveled 37,282.3 miles through space!

You see, there is really no such thing as “sitting still.”

And this brings me back to flunking Physics as a junior in high school and why that experience set me free to think differently about life, especially from a Christian point of view. Physics and its related fields have helped me discover that life is a moving target! LIFE IS ALWAYS ON THE MOVE! Every passing moment brings us to new places in the universe, revealing amazing new vistas to see, experience, and explore.

And the reason for this dynamic nature of life is a wonderful God-made principle that physicists – not theologians! – identified back in the 19th century.

It’s called the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

In simple language, this Law basically says, “heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change acting upon it.”

Say what?

Let me put it this way: Is it possible for cold water to become hot water on its own?

Of course not. Unless there is an external force affecting the cold water – like heat from a stove, or the sun, or a fire, etc. – cold water cannot become hot water.

But – and here’s where this becomes interesting – while cold water cannot become hot on its own, hot water CAN become cold!

This is because of something called “entropy.” Now hang on here because once we “get this” we’ll be in the home stretch. Entropy is a way of describing the order or disorder of a system. Systems of low entropy are well organized while high entropy systems are very disorganized. The Second Law holds that over time low entropy systems become high entropy systems. That is, there is a natural movement in the universe from organized to disorganized.

Put in terms even I – a high school Physics flunky – can understand, let’s think about an egg. An egg is a nice organized system. A broken egg is very disorganized. Right? Now here’s a fun thought: “Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall…”

Remember that childhood rhyme? And what happened to good ol’ Humpty-Dumpty? He took a great fall. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again!

And THAT, my friends, is ENTROPY!

Keeping with the egg theme, have you ever noticed that an egg can become an omelet, but an omelet cannot go back to being an egg? Or that ice cubes can spontaneously melt into water, but water cannot spontaneously become ice cubes?

The Second Law states that there is a direction to life in our universe! Matter is always moving from low entropy to high entropy, never the opposite.

And to make this even more personal:

This is why people are born. They grow. They age. They die.

Never the reverse.

There is a direction to your life, in fact to all of life.

This is something physicists call “the arrow of time” and it is a one-way road into the future. Like it or not, you and I are time-travelers. This is the very nature of life.

So the question that comes to mind when thinking about all this is, “Why did God make the universe this way and what does it all mean for how I understand faith, interact with the world, and live my life?”

I’ll take that up in my next post. In the meantime, enjoy the journey, Space Cadets!