Tolstoy was right - Thanks, Science!

One of my favorite lines in literature is Tolstoy's opening of Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Tolstoy's observation applies, with minor modification, to so many parts of life and nature. Have you ever noticed any of the following?

• Your office gets messy easily, but it doesn't clean easily. There are many ways for it to get messy - tracked leaves on the floor, notes from any of your latest meetings on the desk, your lunch, dust on everything, but there is only one way for it to be tidy - everything in its place, and the dirt in the garbage can.
• A problem is difficult to solve. There are many (possibly an infinite number) unique and unsuccessful ways to try to solve a thorny problem, but maybe only one or two ways to truly solve it. Israeli diplomat Abba Eban said, "nations do act wisely when they have exhausted all the other possibilities."
• When you owned that old car, there was always something new that broke. There is really only one way for the car to work - all of its parts must be functional, but there are many ways for it to break down.

Tolstoy's observation, and all of the other examples, are a result of the second law of thermodynamics - entropy always increases in a closed system. I won't give a detailed description of entropy - there are many available at your fingertips - but it is essentially the amount of disorder in a system, and in a closed system (not influenced from the outside), it always increases. That is why things always seem to break down, rooms get messy, problems are hard to solve, and bad explanations abound while good explanations are hard to discover. The second law of thermodynamics is one of the most powerful laws in science. Its quantitative form, S = k log(W), was described by Ludwig Boltzmann. Boltzmann developed the entropy equation at nearly the same time (mid 1870s) as Tolstoy published Anna Karenina (1877).

Thanks, Science!