Here Comes Science

I faked being sick at work and left early. Then I drove over to the local college where Prof. Maxwell Gibbs used to work. After talking to the receptionist in the main building (I told her I was a reporter for the college newspaper doing a report on previous faculty members), I was forwarded to the receptionist in the Science Building. They pointed me to a completely different building (apparently, it was the Science/Liberal Arts building or something). And there I finally found someone who knew Maxwell Gibbs.

Their name was Professor Holly Sachs, a former colleague of Professor Gibbs. I said I was doing an article on Gibbs and mentioned that he recently died (without mentioning how).

"That makes me sad," she said, "but it's not surprising. Last I had heard, he was living in some cheap motel after losing his home."

I asked her why he had left the college. "He didn't leave," she said. "I probably shouldn't tell you this and I hope you won't use my name, but he was forced out. Towards the end of his tenure here, his ideas became sort of...radical."

"How so?" I asked.

"Well," she said, "he started talking about reversible entropy." My blank face apparently gave her reason to tell me what that meant. "Entropy is the breakdown of a system from order to chaos. From signal to noise." She sighed. "It's hard to explain. Think of an ice cube. In the heat, an ice cub melts. It goes from ordered to chaotic. This is entropy. But you can't reverse entropy. You can't go from chaotic to orderly. You can't unmelt an ice cube."

"Can't you just freeze the water again?" I asked.

"That's not reversing entropy," she said. "That's using entropy in a different system. An ice cube surrounded by heat will increase in entropy, while the surroundings will decrease in entropy - it will become colder around the ice as it melts. In a freezer, however, the warmth is replaced by coldness, so the entropy of an ice cube will remain the same. The entropy of a cup of water, however, will increase, since the water is a different temperature than the surroundings. Once the water and the surroundings are the same temperature - that's when the entropy stops." She shook her head. "But Gibbs wasn't talking about refreezing ice cubes. He was talking about unmelting them. Reversing entropy in a system that was already chaotic." She looked depressed.

"So they kicked him out for that?" I asked.

"No," she said. "No, they kicked him out for something else. That was just the tip of the iceberg, if you'll pardon the pun. His ideas after that became...well, outlandish. He said that there was an anthropomorphic personification of entropy, that he had seen it." She sighed again. "Finally, the last straw came when a student of his found one of his notebooks. It was filled with drawing after drawing of little boys. Nothing indecent, but the college didn't want to take any chances. They kicked him out and that was that."

I thanked her for her candid answers. "Not a problem," she said. "I always felt sorry for what happened to him. I mean, it was obvious that he had mental problems, but he never went to anyone for help and he didn't have anyone to help him. He just all alone."