Wednesday, May 04, 2016

About fever, life and thermodynamics

  I recently had a very bad fever. One which lasted for about two weeks. The thing that do not like about fever the most is that it happens in one day but goes away gradually. So, you start feeling bad from feeling good in less than a day. But, you do not get well suddenly! You do not get the feeling of being well too quickly. That is what I do not like about fevers.


  Thinking about it, what I realise is that this is of course true in every aspect of life. If we let everything to be on their own device, things will become more and more chaotic and it takes quite some effort to make things orderly. That too, will happen gradually.


  We had a chemistry teacher in our school, who tried teaching us about thermodynamics, entropy and chaos. Well, he mostly wasted his and our times. But, he said something that is still in my head. He said that, life is thermodynamically unfavourable process. So, it takes effort to keep life going. I think it is true for all the aspects of life in general. It needs just one infection to get you a fever, one small disagreement to break off a relationship, one small mistake to let go of an opportunity of a lifetime.


  There is one quote often attributed to famous Indian statistician P. C. Mahalanobis. I am not sure about its authenticity, but it says, disease is contagious, health is not. It takes very little effort to go towards disorderliness, but a lot to keep it as you want something to be.