Why do things tend to go wrong?

Ever heard of the saying, ‘Anything that can go wrong will go wrong’. This is known as Murphy’s law. If you believe in Karma, then even more, thing’s would tend to go wrong or against you. More wrong than before! Karma or not, why do things go wrong in the first place?

Being an atheist, and until 2 weeks ago, I was pondering on whether or not I am allowed to believe in Karma. Karma is a belief that every contemplation and action of one will have an influence on oneself’s future, so it basically is a philosophical treatment given to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, Thermodynamics and Chaos theory. The result of my battle was, Science doesn’t allow Karma. In scientific terms, Karma essentially is a series of coincidence’s and the result of Second Law of Thermodynamics. If you want to watch more on coincidences, watch the video ‘Spooky Coincidences’ by Michael Stevens from Vsauce, for thermodynamics, continue reading.

Entropy is the measure of disorder in the system and the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that Entropy of an isolated system always increases. More disordered something is, higher the entropy, and more ordered the system is, lower the entropy. An egg has a lower entropy because it is in an ordered state. A broken egg, is disordered, hence it has high entropy. If you leave vegetables or meat outside the refrigerator, they will rot. Overtime, your room will get disorganised. A disorganised room has high entropy, while an organised room has less entropy. You, as a human being at a highly ordered set of atoms and molecules arranged in a set pattern to work in complex ways. To maintain life in your body requires energy, and when you stop providing that energy, most commonly in death, your body starts to decompose. To reduce the Entropy of a system, that is, to organise it, to increase the Order, requires energy, while the reverse, happens by giving off heat, the most basic form of energy.

Hence the direct consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is that disorder in a system will tend to increase. There are only a few ways in which something (system) can be ordered, but a million different ways it can be in disorder. If each of the different way’s had equal probability, then collectively the probability of getting things wrong, or the disordered ways would obviously be higher, meaning that overall (and eventually), systems will tend to achieve disorder. Therefore the probability of something being in a disordered state is higher. How long can you keep a class of students quiet? If you let them be on their own, they are bound to get into disorder! Likewise, there are only a few ways of doing something right, but a million other way’s of doing something wrong.

A very famous example, it’s said that Thomas Alva Edison failed 2000 times before getting the electric bulb to work correctly, which equates to a probability of 99.95% that he got it wrong.

Philosophically speaking, in a way, things will go bad unless you make an effort to make them right. If thing’s still don’t go your way, at least you know you can blame Thermodynamics for it!