I was sitting on my balcony the other evening, watching a sunset that had no business being that perfect. Purples bleeding into oranges, the kind of sky that makes you forget your phone for a minute. And then, like it always does, it faded. The colors dulled. The streetlights took over. Show’s over.
And I thought about something that has quietly haunted me for years.
Why does everything beautiful insist on ending?
Not just sunsets. Everything. The earth will die one day. The sun will swallow it or abandon it, depending on which astrophysicist you ask. Your grandmother’s hands, once steady enough to thread a needle in dim light, now tremble over a cup of tea. The garden your father spent twenty years perfecting will, given enough neglect, return to weeds within a single monsoon season. Civilizations rise, peak, and then leave behind ruins for tourists to photograph.
This isn’t pessimism. This is observation. And the explanation, strangely enough, was hiding in two concepts I first encountered during my engineering days, probably in the first semester, probably while half-asleep in a morning lecture.
Entropy and Error Accumulation.
Two ideas from two different fields, thermodynamics and computer science, that together explain the fate of literally everything that exists.
The Universe Has a Preference, and It Isn’t Beauty
Let’s start with entropy, because the universe did.
The second law of thermodynamics, stripped of its textbook language, says something brutally simple: disorder in a closed system always increases over time. Energy spreads out. Structure loosens. Things fall apart.
Not sometimes. Always.
Your hot cup of coffee will cool down to room temperature. It will never, on its own, heat back up by pulling warmth from the air around it. Technically, the laws of physics don’t forbid this. But statistically, the odds of all those air molecules conspiring to donate their kinetic energy back into your coffee are so astronomically small that you would need more time than the universe has left to wait for it.
This is what entropy really means. It’s not chaos. It’s probability. There are overwhelmingly more ways for things to be disordered than ordered. A sandcastle has one shape. The sand it’s made from has billions of possible scattered configurations. Given time and tide, which arrangement do you think wins?
Now zoom out. Your body is a sandcastle. An absurdly complex, magnificently improbable sandcastle made of trillions of cells working in coordination, proteins folding into exact shapes, electrical signals firing across synapses with microsecond timing. You are, thermodynamically speaking, an insult to the universe’s preference for disorder. You are a middle finger raised at entropy.
But entropy is patient. It always collects.
The wrinkles on your skin, the graying of your hair, the slowing of your step. These aren’t failures. They are entropy doing what it has always done, gently, inevitably, reclaiming the order you borrowed.
A flower blooms because biology briefly overpowers thermodynamics. But the bloom was always temporary. The universe wasn’t designed for permanence. It was designed for spreading out, cooling down, and dissolving.
The Photocopier Problem
Now let’s talk about error accumulation, and this one hits differently because it’s almost painfully intuitive.
You’ve probably heard some version of this: take a document and photocopy it. Then photocopy the photocopy. Then photocopy that copy. Do this a hundred times. What you end up with is an unreadable mess. Each copy introduced a tiny error, a slightly shifted pixel, a faintly smudged letter, and those errors compounded. Not one single copy was dramatically worse than the one before it. But collectively? Degradation.
In computer science, this is a well-understood problem. Every time data is copied, transmitted, or processed, there’s a small chance of error. These errors don’t cancel each other out. They accumulate. Without active error correction, any system that copies itself repeatedly will drift further and further from its original form.
Now think about your DNA.
Every cell in your body contains a copy of your genetic code. And every time a cell divides, that code gets copied. Your body performs this copying billions of times over your lifetime. There are proofreading mechanisms, yes, molecular spellcheckers that catch and fix most mistakes. But “most” is not “all.” Some errors slip through. They accumulate. Over decades, the manuscript of you develops typos. Some are harmless. Some are not.
This is aging at its most fundamental level. You are not simply wearing out like a machine with moving parts. You are a document being photocopied over and over, and the copies are getting noisier.
Cancer, in many cases, is what happens when enough errors accumulate in exactly the wrong genes. It’s not bad luck in the way we usually think of luck. It’s statistics catching up.
And it’s not just biology. Think about cultures. Traditions passed down through generations slowly shift and distort, not because anyone decided to change them, but because the transmission is imperfect. Languages drift. Recipes lose ingredients. Stories gain embellishments. The original signal degrades with every retelling.
Two Laws, One Verdict
Here’s what strikes me about these two concepts sitting side by side.
Entropy operates on the macro scale. It’s the universe’s tax on order, collected in energy, in heat, in the slow dissolution of structure. It tells us that the arrow of time points in one direction, toward equilibrium, toward sameness, toward stillness.
Error accumulation operates on the micro scale. It’s the quiet corruption of information, copy by copy, generation by generation. It tells us that no signal survives infinite transmission without loss.
One attacks the container. The other attacks the contents.
Between the two of them, nothing stands a chance. Not you, not the Himalayas, not the Voyager spacecraft drifting through interstellar space, not the sun itself. The timeline differs. The outcome doesn’t.
So Why Does Any of It Matter?
This is the part where a lesser essay would pivot to toxic positivity. “That’s why you should live in the moment!” or “Carpe diem!” or some variation of the same bumper sticker philosophy.
I’m not going to do that.
Instead, I want to sit with the discomfort for a second. Because I think the real insight here isn’t about urgency. It’s about what beauty actually is.
Beauty is order that knows it’s temporary. A sunset is beautiful not despite the fact that it will end in twelve minutes, but because of it. If sunsets were permanent, they’d be wallpaper. We’d complain about the glare.
Your mother’s youth was beautiful. Your dog’s enthusiasm is beautiful. That one Tuesday in 2019 when everything just seemed to click for no particular reason, that was beautiful. And none of it was built to last.
Because lasting was never the point.
Entropy and error accumulation are not villains. They are the reason anything matters at all. In a universe where nothing decayed, nothing would have value. Scarcity creates meaning. Impermanence creates urgency. The fact that the sand is always slipping through the hourglass is exactly what makes you look at it.
I learned about entropy and error accumulation in an engineering classroom, under fluorescent lights, copying formulas I’d forget by the weekend. It took me years to realize that those two ideas weren’t just exam material. They were the most honest description of reality anyone had ever handed me.
Everything beautiful ends. Not because the universe is cruel. But because “beautiful” and “temporary” were always the same word, wearing different clothes.
End Note: The greatest gift that I feel God has given me, is setting up the right kind of people, at the right time of my life who have empowered me to think beyond the norms. The person who introduced this concept to me, sadly was a victim to entropy. Summer of 2006, first semester of engineering, our dean Professor Srivatsa Nanda enters our class and starts talking about Le Chatelier’s Principle. He talks about Entropy and I sit there in awe realising how small I’m in the grand schema of things.
What followed was a mutual sense of respect and admiration. I used to go to the staff room during my breaks and discuss my opinion about many thesis in Physics. Our discussions would range from the simplest of the topics like “Math & Beauty” and his travels to CERN to see the Large Hadron Collider. I had been reading Dan Brown a lot and specifically “Angels & Demons” captivated my interest in this field. I still remember one of his remark when he asked me to ease up while falling into a rabbit hole, stating, a young brain as mine shouldn’t strain itself into such complexities.
After sometime post his random visits, an equally bright lad in thirties, Chandrasekhar Saran takes over Thermodynamics for us. Dean Nanda left our college during my fourth semester to join DRIEMS university, Cuttack. During my final year, when I travelled to meet, I sadly learn about his demise due to Cancer.
PS: Dedicated in loving memory of Professor Srivatsa Nanda, one of the brightest person to live and instil the sense of thinking beyond the norm, in the lives of all the students he came across.
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