Alles in Ordnung.

The Fabric of the Cosmos will be the last spacey pop-physics book I read for a long time. I have spent the past year devouring one after another and it has been rewarding. But so many of these 500-page tomes reach the exhausting conclusion that we may never understand what the universe is made of, where it came from, or how it really works. By and large, I'm optimistic about it. We might never understand the universe, but I'm sure that computers will figure it out within our lifetimes. And if they're friendly computers, maybe they will do us the courtesy of explaining it in simple terms, like we're a classroom full of pre-intermediate Polish students.

An understanding of the fundamental structure of the universe is not something that is likely to reveal itself to me on some bleary random morning while I'm taking a dump. It's much more likely to reveal itself to some string theorist while he or she is taking a dump. And even if I did chance upon the fundamental structure of the universe easily explained and diagrammed in a little yellow leaflet handed to me as I passed through the Stare Miasto for a kebab, I would still have to live with myself, wouldn't I? I'd still have to clip my fingernails and tie my shoes and fumble with the keys every time I try to unlock a door. Cosmology collapses under the mundane weight of existential baggage. Tomorrow, I'm going to get on a train and curl up with some Kafka.

But on my field trip into the lonely realm of stoner physics, I have learned much about practical thermodynamics. Entropy is the way of the world. If you let things go to shit, to shit they will go. If you tear the binding off of your copy of The Brothers Karamazov and toss the pages up into the air, they will not land the way Dostoevsky would want them to, and never in a billion billion years would they sort themselves out. Fabric unravels, but it doesn't ravel. Likewise, eggs don't unbreak, people don't undie, and when you cheese off your British flatmates by leaving a festering bottle of grapefruit juice in the fridge for two weeks, they will not spontaneously start acknowledging your existence on the last day of your CELTA course. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall ...

"Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against nature ... the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worthwhile."
- Nathaniel West