Inspiration comes in many forms for many people - family, friends, teachers, profound

quotes, and life-altering songs. For me, inspiration was hard to come by. I was a young girl with

so many questions and too much doubt. I was determined to find the point of my existence and I

wasn’t willing to settle until I did. Eventually, I found a muse in science. The law of conservation

of energy persuades me to get out of bed every morning because there has to be energy

somewhere in the world for me to do so. The law of natural selection motivates me to work hard

- if one of my ancestors had an advantageous gene pool, then surely I can be successful enough

to pass down those genes. Boyle’s Law encourages me to go outside to clear my head when I am

stressed, as I will be under less pressure there. The laws that govern the physical universe govern

me in all aspects of my life, but they also influence and inspire me - none so much as the second

law of thermodynamics.

The first time I heard of it, I was a sixth-grader who had picked up a physics book at the

library. The first law was easy for me to understand; energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Capiche. The third law - slightly more difficult, but still pretty straightforward: at absolute zero

temperature, an isolated system must reach the ground state. Cool (pun absolutely intended). But

the second law - try as I might, I could not wrap my head around it. It wasn’t the wording or the

structure; I knew exactly what my battered old textbook meant when it said the entropy of an

isolated system cannot decrease. What I could not understand was the implications of that

statement - if entropy cannot decrease in an isolated system, it must increase. Maybe it was

wishful thinking - Barack Obama was president, the Patriots were the defending Super Bowl

champions, and I had not yet been exposed to the horrors of the world - but I couldn’t fathom

how the universe, as an isolated system, could be descending into chaos and unpredictability.
The Bill Gateses and Malala Yousafzais and Jane Goodalls of the world must be making Earth

into a more organized place, right? Surely, the world was only becoming more predictable.

I forced myself to take a step back and look at the situation analytically. I fell back on

what scientists had been doing for millennia: observing. I would use 2016 to start tallying events

that could be counted towards the world’s chaos. I felt confident that I would prove my theory

right; there was no way the Earth was falling into pandemonium. Spoiler alert: I was mistaken. In

2016, Peyton Manning retired. An openly gay man became the Secretary of the Army. A gorilla

was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo. A man opened fire in an LGBTQ nightclub, killing 49

people. Transgender people were allowed to serve in the military. Donald Trump won the GOP

nomination for president. A woman led a presidential ticket of a major party. Brock Turner only

served three months of jail time. The Cubs won the World Series. Donald Trump was elected

president.

Every single one of these events came out of the right field for me. My hypothesis was

proven wrong - the world was, in fact, dissolving into messy, uncontrollable chaos. I had a

not-so-midlife crisis at this point; what was the point of existence if life continued to fall apart no

matter what? I and the world were tumbling into disaster, and it seemed so much harder to pull

everything back together to a vague semblance of normalcy than it was to just let chaos happen.

Alas, I was only 12 years old, and spending the rest of my life contemplating the planet’s

ultimate demise was not a feasible option. Therefore, I had to look at the second law in a

different way - a way to inspire instead rather than dishearten. Eventually, I came up with this:

sometimes, random is good. Sometimes, random galvanizes people into living - people, with

their baffling ability to persevere even when the universe tells them not to. Every day, even as the

world hurtles towards bedlam, billions of people wake up and continue on - that’s the most
unpredictable thing in the universe. They read poetry and quote pop culture and run in colored

powder and get into tomato fights in the street and play music and sing and dance and fall in

love, purely for the sake of it, in a beautiful, tumultuous, three-ring circus.

I am a firm believer in science - it is a constant I can always rely on to guide me through

everyday life. Humanity exists because of a series of happy accidents that led to the most

unlikely of occurrences - the formation of a planet, the creation of life, and the evolution of the

Homo sapien. The significance of this is not lost on me - how amazing and inspiring is life itself?

How inconceivable is it that we exist? The world is unpredictable and the second law of

thermodynamics does prevail - but we’re here anyway. Our hearts are beating, our lungs are

breathing, and we are living. What could be more inspiring than that?