Complex Numbers

Epiphany

I'm pretty sure I've written about this before, but it's been a while and I've been thinking about it a bit recently.

PROMPT November 19^th

We've all had one or several epiphany's in our lives. Tonight, write about a moment in your life that changed the way you view the world.

And I touched on it in this week's Fantasy newsletter, but most people don't bother to read editorials. I know I don't.

I've heard people describe creation and destruction as opposites, or as two sides of the same coin.

But one night, driving alone (which is one reason I like to drive alone), it hit me like a truck: they're not opposites, they're not two sides of the same coin... they are the exact same thing.

Of course, there is one distinction, and that's local entropy. As we all know, the total entropy of a closed system has to stay the same or increase (you do know that, right?) But the key there is "closed system." We can construct a building, for instance, which has lower entropy (at least at first) because we're putting energy into it, causing entropy to increase elsewhere.

So for what I'm talking about here, entropy is local and irrelevant. I'm talking about the inability to make a truly objective decision as to whether a thing or system was created or destroyed. Any such label applies only to the value we put on the things that have changed.

Take the building I just used as an example. You can speak of creating it, building it, which is usually a massive coordinated effort between many different specialists, not just onsite, but all of the people who make the individual items that go into the building's construction.

So you chop down a tree, which destroys the tree -- but you make lumber from it. One could even say that putting the lumber together into the building's frame destroys it; it's no longer lumber but studs or joists or whatever. The value we put on what is created or destroyed is subjective.

One might object, "sure, but if you drop a bomb on something, it's destroyed." Yes, it destroys the bomb and the target, from one point of view. From another, it creates debris and rubble and... well, at the risk of getting morbid, maybe corpses.

Sure, the people getting bombed would consider that a bad thing, but to the ones doing the bombing, that's the desired outcome. They've created what they set out to create, as chaotic as that is.

Right now, I'm creating a blog entry, but in order to do so I'm destroying the previous arrangement of atoms on a semiconductor chip. You can't write a book without destroying blank paper.

Now, before someone comments about it, yes, I'm fully aware that in the larger picture, nothing can actually be created or destroyed, only transformed, but that's not the point, either. The point is, like I said, "creation" and "destruction" are mere value judgements slapped onto the larger concept of change.

And that was the epiphany I had maybe a quarter-century ago for no particular reason except that I was driving, it was night, and it was my birthday.