Order and disorder are central to our understanding of the world. Biologists define life as the expending of energy to create order. In neuroscience, a 2023 MIT study concluded the mind operates in the play between order and chaos when seeking to make sense of the world. While physics goes further embedding the notion in a fundamental law of the universe, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which requires that disorder, defined as 'entropy', always increases. But critics argue order and disorder are human concepts and depend on our perspective. How are we then to make sense of the idea they are objective states of the universe? Especially when there would appear to be a great deal more order on the Earth since it first formed as a ball of fire some four billion years ago.
Should we throw order and disorder out of the scientific canon, along with entropy and the Second Law? Can we eradicate subjectivity and define order and chaos purely mathematically? Or, is the real problem the distinction between the subjective and objective in the first place?