Wonders of the Universe - Brian Cox [91]
Clausius introduced the concept of entropy because he found it useful, but what exactly is entropy, and what is the deep reason that it always increases? And what was the meaning of Eddington’s cryptic quote about randomness and the arrow of time? He seemed to be equating entropy with the amount of randomness in the world, and indeed he was. Understanding this will make it clear why the Second Law of Thermodynamics mandates that our entire universe must, one day, die
ENTROPY IN ACTION
In 1908 in the small town of Kolmanskop in southern Namibia, a railway worker by the name of Zacharias Lewala found a single diamond lying in the sand. He showed the precious stone to his manager – railway inspector August Stauch – who immediately realised its significance and set in motion a train of events that turned this desolate place into one of the most valuable diamond mines in the world. The colonial German government closed the entire area to outsiders; only German entrepreneurs were allowed to make their fortunes here. For 40 years, Kolmanskop was home to a thriving community as over a thousand people gathered, seeking to become millionaires by picking diamonds out of the desert. As the money rolled in, the residents built a town in the finest German tradition; grand houses stood beside a casino, a ballroom and the first X-ray station in the Southern Hemisphere. They led a champagne lifestyle in the desert, and created a little piece of opulent German architecture in the sand. Eventually, though, as with all cash cows, the diamonds could no longer be found and the town gradually lost its sparkle until it was abandoned in 1954. For half a century it has fallen into disrepair as the buildings are slowly reclaimed by the sands.
Today Kolmanskop is a ghost town, a place where our efforts to replace the geological grandeur of the desert with architectural grandeur of our own have been thwarted by the power of the winds.
Kolmanskop lies just outside the modern port town of Lüderitz, which sits in spectacular isolation on the southern Namibian coast. One of our guides told us that it takes a special kind of Namibian to set up home in Lüderitz – you have to really want to live there. The reason this place has a reputation for being particularly harsh, even by the standards of this part of the world, is the wind. This strip of the southern African coast is permanently assaulted by the untamed winds of the South Atlantic that whip up the fine-grained sands of the Namib Desert and hurl them unrelentingly into machinery, houses, camera equipment and eyes. I have never experienced anything like it. While filming, I found myself walking through the wind at Kolmanskop with my hands completely shielding my face. I didn’t do this for dramatic effect, I genuinely couldn’t look into the lacerating sand-laden wind. We also shot a scene showing a little sandcastle gradually blowing away; the camera we left in the desert for hours to film that had its lens sandblasted – the high-precision optics felt like sandpaper after a single spring afternoon in the vicinity of Lüderitz. If it wasn’t for the fact that it never rains here, and nothing rots, the ghost town of Kolmanskop would surely already have already disappeared back into the desert.
The opulent buildings of the once-glorious town of Kolmanskop are a shadow of their former selves as the desert sands blow across them and reclaim the landscape.
The little sandcastle slowly decaying in the desert wind vividly demonstrates the connection between decay, randomness and entropy. To understand why this is so, we’ll need a different and much more intuitive definition of entropy than that given by Clausius. Known as the statistical definition