A title few can easily explain

The title of the book, the notes begin, is Entropy. Yet few people, hearing that title alone, can easily call up the idea of the law of entropy and speak of it. The book is for such people. In the end, they write, the law of entropy names a physical limit that cannot but restrict human activity at the root.

The idea runs against ordinary common sense. We have lived as if the future would unfold without limit, and as if there were no physical bound. But if one thinks about it, the world does advance in some respects, and at the same time it is clearly growing more confused and disordered. The stopgap measures we put forward to solve a problem may settle what is immediately in front of us, yet in the long run they often give birth to another, larger problem.

Worldviews, and an entropy watershed

The more problems the world has, the more we need, in order to mend it, to step outside the received worldview and learn anew how the world is put together. Worldviews are changing. Historically they flowed from the Greeks, and through five stages of historical cycle and decline, into a Christian worldview, and then reached a modern one. A mechanical worldview arose, and the present, as everyone knows, is an age of machines.

In that setting, entropy is making a new frame for a view of history, because history follows the law of entropy. When the flow of energy reaches an entropy watershed, and a new energy environment is made, the old contents that had been used for the former flow become useless.

Exhausted resources, and prices that do not stop rising

Today, non-renewable resources around the world are being rapidly exhausted. At each stage of the energy flow, techniques and tools grow more complex and specialised. Because we live by consuming energy on a vast scale, a serious distortion appears in economic flows as we approach the entropy watershed. A representative case is inflation, which today is directly tied to the problem of exhausted resources.

As it becomes harder to draw usable sources of energy from the environment, huge costs are required, and the related costs keep rising. The result is that producers and consumers alike face prices that rise without end. The notes leave the book at that rise, before a later heading that only restates a worldview of entropy. The author is not named in this stretch. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of a book titled Entropy: a physical limit on human activity, changing worldviews, an energy watershed, and prices that rise as usable energy grows harder to extract. The author is not named in this stretch.

Last updated: 15 November 2026