Entropy has been weighing on my mind and body
by Jean Stimmell “Even the words that we are speaking now, thieving time has stolen away, and nothing can return.” — Horace, Odes, 23 BC Watching my body fall apart at the age of 78, I can no longer ignore the fact that entropy is taking over. Entropy, of course, is the scientific fact that everything in the cosmos winds down, the universal reality that order inevitably turns toward disorder. As Carlo Rovelli has written in The Order of Time, 1 entropy is special: as opposed to all the other laws of the universe, time is not reversible. You can’t go backward. How well I …