There is a cuckoo clock…
There is a cuckoo clock in the living room of my house, just about one-and-a-half meters to the right of the door. It’s a simple little cuckoo clock (my parents like cuckoo clocks), with little dancing folk and simple music box-type tunes playing every half-hour, and, of course, a simple little bird popping out of the door in the middle to go “cuckoo.” It’s pendulum-based, not battery or quartz-powered, and so has some chains at the back that one has to consistently wind (they drop a few centimeters every hour) in order to keep it functional.
Ever since I was a child, I was annoyed by that clock, probably as an offshoot of being freaked out by it cuckooing at ungodly hours (and being very out-of-the-blue, at that)—children are not very good cuckoo clock-connoisseurs. But it was a love-hate relationship: inasmuch as I hated its ringing, I could never avoid winding it back up whenever I saw the chains moving down. I could blame my obsessive-compulsive disorder (the real one, mind you, not people who like arranging pencils calling themselves OCD-positive), but I’ve gotten over it and am still always, always, always winding that cuckoo clock—yes, I’ve just wound it again. It is almost as if a silent purpose moves through me, takes over me, whenever I see the chains lower than they should be.
Perhaps it is my inner drive to find order.
But alas, what is order? We are born into a universe whose future Lord Kelvin’s mind has projected to be filled with energy—aptly dubbed the heat death of the universe—due to a continually increasing level of entropy, a requirement for physical and chemical, and by extension also biological processes to occur. The idea moved quickly from science to philosophy, and people have always been intrigued with what this could mean for man.
But those intrigued by the notion often forget the other side of the coin. From where does an increase in universal entropy come? From masses that release energy. General biology tells us that there is a continual dissipation of useful energy by living organisms due to heat—this heat we send into the universe, and then once again heat death comes into mind. But no, I am not talking about the heat death of the universe; I am talking about the masses that release this energy into the universe. What of them? They lose energy—they become more stable, more orderly, more thermodynamically at-ease.
The universe, then, seems to be at a struggle between a need for complete and utter chaos and complete and utter equilibrium.
