"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative."
CP Snow: The Two Cultures, Rede Lecture
1959.
SOPHIST's CHOICE
How penalty shoot outs in FA Cup replays
finally prove the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Unfortunately, what Snow says is true. How many people have even heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, let alone can describe it? Which is a great shame for as the Laws of Physics go, the Second Law is a real beauty. One of the best. If Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is the Pele of the scientific world, then this baby is, at the very least, the Diego Maradona.
Which is a nice way of getting round to football. Bear with us and you'll see how by allowing stalemated cup-ties to be settled by penalties after the first replay, the FA have effectively given in to the dictates of the thermodynamic theory.
The Second Law is often summed up as follows: "Entropy increases in a closed thermodynamic system." Entropy is the measure of energy unavailable for work. Now this may all sound like gobbledegook so far, but it comes about from the common observation that heat always passes from a warmer to a cooler object. Thus, when the Workington fan puts his hand in the fire he gets burned. Let's say his pals decide to copy him: eventually all the available heat energy will be more or less uniformly distributed through their fat little fingers. But the implications of this are colossally, mind numbingly frightening, and not just for Workington fans. Since the Cosmos is itself a finite thermodynamic system, it will at some time exhaust all its available energy in what scientists call the 'heat death of the Universe'.
Philosophers see the law as proof of the eventual triumph of chaos over order in the Universe. In the most basic terms that nobody could possibly fail to understand, all it's essentially saying is 'Sooner or later everything turns to $#¡*!' To put that into a football context: imagine that the Vauxhall Conference is the Universe (which to all intents and purposes it is) and that at the end of the season every team in it had won, drawn and lost fourteen games, and scored and conceded exactly the same number of goals. Maximum entropy, no prospect for change, though no doubt Altrincham, alphabetically champions after being pipped last year, wouldn't mind too much.
However, we humans can at least temporarily arrest the flow of entropy. Here's yet another football metaphor by way of illustration: imagine a pitch with a ball on the centre spot. This can be seen as a system in a state of almost total entropy - pitch and ball would quite happily lay there all day were nothing to disturb them. Should 22 people and a referee with an inkling to pass ninety minutes somehow happen on the scene however, then hopefully we're in for some action! Indeed, the whole history of human enterprise and endeavour can be seen as an ultimately feeble attempt to battle with a Universe that inexorably grinds towards thermodynamic constancy.
But that's no reason why we shouldn't keep on trying. Although cup-ties that remain unresolved after four or five games bring disruption to other fixtures and big headaches for the police, think of all those pitches and balls lying around unused, idly contributing to the future demise of the Universe. Isn't delaying the inevitable day just a bit more important than denying a few honest coppers a bit of overtime? The FA's decision to have ties settled by penalties if still undecided after extra-time of only one replay, is really just giving in to the Second Law without a fight. It is, without a doubt, the most facile attempt to regulate chaos since whoever invented synchronised swimming was discharged from the asylum.
Issue 009 - December 1991
