Since the Dawn of History, old people have bitched about young people and young people have bitched about old people. If you don’t believe me, see it here for yourself.

But now, after pondering a basic law of physics, I submit that these claims can be scientifically explained. The law of which I speak is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or The Law of Entropy.

As far as my hair-brain can tell, the Law of Entropy states that heat will always seek to become dissipated, or in other words, order tends to move to chaos. The example always cited is of a teacup that falls to the floor and shatters. In this example, the teacup has a potential energy as measured by the distance between it and the floor and the attractive force of gravity compelling it toward its doom. When it falls, this potential energy becomes kinetic energy which causes the cup to shatter upon impact with the floor. In the natural universe, we would not expect the teacup to miraculously reassemble itself, even if it had the ability to convert its spent kinetic energy back to potential energy. Hence order is easily turned to chaos but chaos does not naturally revert to an ordered state.

Now to be fair, we must also understand that the concepts of order and chaos are human constructs, and the association of chaos with shattered glass is a subjective assumption, but that is far outside the scope of my argument here.

There is a certain time-honored gripe among older folks, that the world is going to Hell in a bucket. I used to think, well, people have been saying that for as long as I can recall, and we haven’t gotten to Hell yet, so therefore it can’t be true.

But when the Law of Entropy is taken into account, I can argue quite righteously that the world is indeed going to Hell in a bucket, and further that the world is far worse off than it was when I grew up. The degradation of the world is, in fact, increasing exponentially, and has been since the Dawn of History.

The corollary of my argument is that Kids These Days, having experienced more chaos than their elders, can quite rightly claim that old people are slow, boring, and often malodorous. These claims, while disrespectful, are also true according to the Law of Entropy, since their elders are accustomed to a far more orderly and calm world.

If you’d like to ponder entropy some more (and I know you do), follow the following link to Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question.