Why Things Break

This is an essay I wrote during my english class. The subject was "Why things break". My aproach was a little bit different, but I had fun writing it. Enjoy:

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Whether you believe in the laws of physics or a creating God, everything started in order - either in the gardens of Eden or in the tiny tiny nothing before the Big Bang. Ever since things are doing their best to reach a state of disorder. The more disorder there is in the universe the less entropy and the more satisfied all the small atoms are, just following the laws of physics.

How does this disorder thing affect us humans? To be able to create all the wonders the human race have done since the dawn of time we have been forced to create a bigger disorder elsewhere, for instance by using fire to make glass we throw away energy, in the form of heat, out in the space. We then make order in the disorder, but the laws of physics are not turned off by our efforts. Even if the atoms in for example glass are stuck together by small forces they have Freddy Mercury’s voice in Queen programmed into their imaginary brains: “I want to break free”. They therefore try to follow the political history during the twentieth century: “It is nice to be here together in an 'all are equal' communistic way”, feels good for them in the beginning, until... they can feel the breeze of freedom from touching their neighbors all the time when they pass the edge of the table and starts to fall towards the floor. “I want my liberal rights to be free from everyone and and follow my own path, as long as I do not have a negative impact on others!” becomes their new motto for a short period of history. The liberal thoughts suddenly makes them think in egoistic ways, and the dream of independence starts to shout out loud in the break of the glass: “I want anarchy, no-one and nothing shall affect me and my way!”, and then, suddenly, there will be silence for a while in the anarchistic atoms when they notice they are all alone and have nothing left more than the dead space around. Then the atomistic fun is over, for the time being, and the political history of the humans turns into economics.

When the atoms are on that level of breaking apart, on what level are then the humans?

The human race think they ARE the order of the universe, looking like Gods - according to their holy books - and trying to force every little atom to follow their will, but that is just an illusion. Even on this level of order in the universe the law of disorder are working slowly but effective to separate and make the amount of disorder higher and higher all the time.

When you look upon a family you might see that two adults have come together as two primary sub-units in one. Later it might be even more sub-units, secondary, working together as one. Everything looks good on the surface, but deep inside the sub-units there are forces that are working to make more disorder – to separate them from each other - to make the family-thing break.

There are two ways a family might break:

The first way of breaking is when the children, the secondary sub-units, are old enough to try to start an own family-unit. Then the family breaks apart in a happy break up party, celebrating that more disorder have been reached in the universe.

Sometimes it is the primary family-sub-units that are not fitting together any longer resulting in a breaking apart that will not, in most cases, end with the happy kind of “disorder in the universe”-party. This will instead result in even more disorder than the first way. Other sub-units in other families will be affected in different ways making the original break-up to be new problems for them, because they might side with different parts in the conflict- This suits the physical law of disorder perfectly, speeding up the universe physical aim: to break apart more and get colder, that means higher entropy.

To be able to construct things physically or mentally you always have to learn science to get a better understanding why things break. When you have learned this you will be able to construct better things that will not break as easy as before, working against the laws of physics but favoring your creativity as a technician and the order around you.