Entropy as Disorder: The Cosmic Cleaning Myth

In popular science, entropy is often presented as a measure of disorder. Broken eggs, messy rooms, scattered papers — these everyday images supposedly explain the second law of thermodynamics. It’s an alluring metaphor: instantly graspable, intuitively moral, and culturally satisfying. But it’s profoundly misleading.

The problem is that this metaphor imports cultural notions of tidiness into a statistical, relational phenomenon. Entropy does not judge the universe for being messy, and it is not a cosmic janitor keeping score. Its proper meaning is relational and probabilistic: it measures the number of possible configurations compatible with a system’s constraints, not the moral or aesthetic quality of those configurations.

From a relational ontology perspective, entropy is about potentialities, not mess. It tracks the unfolding of possibilities across time and context. No broom is required; no “cleanliness” exists outside of construal. By equating entropy with disorder, we risk confusing human preferences with fundamental physics.

Parody drives the point home. If entropy were disorder, physicists would moonlight as professional organisers, folding the universe into neat drawers, vacuuming black holes, and leaving sticky notes on neutron stars. The cosmos would have a Marie Kondo department, and supernovae would be condemned for leaving the sky cluttered.

The takeaway: metaphors are seductive, but in this case they actively mislead. Entropy is a measure of possibilities, a relational concept describing how systems align their potentials. Disorder is a convenient fiction; relational actualisation is reality.