There's No Free Lunch
My friend Bill, a retired actuary, invited me to his garage workshop. He was excited about something and wanted me to come right away to see it.
“No one in human history has ever done this!” he yelled over the phone.
Balding with white hair on both sides of his head, he greeted me enthusiastically as I entered the garage, his wide eyes even wider as they flashed behind his Coke-bottle glasses. I walked in and saw the first-of-its-kind contraption on the table.
It was an old Schwinn bicycle tire, mounted horizontally on a rig and rotating at a moderate speed. The apparatus, a series of metal plates and magnets of varying sizes, was held together by a haphazard collection of zip ties.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Bill purred.
“I’m amazed you found an old Schwinn bicycle tire.”
“Oh, Robert, Robert,” he chastised. “I knew you would miss the point. Do I have to spell it out for you? It’s a perpetual motion machine!”
“Well, it spins pretty smoothly,” I conceded.
“Of course it does. That’s how perpetual, absolutely frictionless energy works!”
Just then, a chaotic pulse swept into the garage, and a man in a tweed jacket appeared out of nowhere. He was short, round-shouldered, and had a birdlike face complete with accusatory eyes magnified by round spectacles.
“Who are you?” Bill asked, shocked.
“I am the Second Law of Thermodynamics!” he declared, waving a document in the air. “And I am ordering you to cease and desist all operation of this, this, er, this contraption immediately.”
It was clear that the Second Law found the machine highly offensive.
Bill turned to me. “I knew something like this would happen if I invited you, Robert. You always bring these anthropomorphic representations of human concepts with you, like Clio and the Past. But this!”
“That’s right,” said the Second Law. “I am the Second Law in the flesh, for your convenience, of course. Do you know who I am?” he asked menacingly.
“Well, duh,” Bill said. “You can’t very well build a perpetual motion machine without knowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics backward and forward.”
Bill looked at me, and it was clear to him that I didn't know anything about the Second Law—backward, forward, or upside down.
“So, Robert,” Bill began, as if talking to a child, “the Second Law says that natural processes always move in one direction, from order to disorder, and useful energy is always lost as wasted heat whenever work is done. This is called entropy. For example, a popsicle can only melt, going from ordered ice to less ordered water. It can only go one way; the water won’t jump right back onto the stick and freeze. It applies to everything we do: burning gas in cars, breaking eggs…”
“I see,” I said. “I think.” Then another thought occurred to me. “Where’s the First Law of Thermodynamics? Is there such a thing?”
“Unfortunately, there is—he’s my twin brother,” sighed the Second Law. Seeing my confusion, he added, “The First Law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it only changes form. Since he oversees total energy remaining constant, he just sits on some cosmic couch bingeing Netflix.”
The Second Law closed his eyes to regain his composure, most likely due to visualizing the wreckage of his slothful brother.
“But anyway, let’s get down to business,” he continued, handing Bill the document. “I am issuing this cease-and-desist order against your horrid machine. As the Second Law of Thermodynamics states, you cannot operate this machine without the disorder of friction. You need to waste energy like everything else!”
“You can’t do that!” protested Bill.
“And furthermore,” the Second Law continued, ignoring Bill, “you now have to make up for the energy you should have wasted to balance the books. As explained in the court order, you are ordered to spend the next year arguing incessantly on X.com. As a result of endless acrimonious arguments, your increased heart rate and metabolism will repay the friction you stole with your perpetual motion machine. And if you argue hard enough, you’ll generate extra heat in the server farms, which will further reduce your sentence.”
“No way! I’m not doing that!” Bill exclaimed. “You can’t make me!”
“We’ll see about that.”
In an instant, under the commanding gaze of the Second Law, the machine crumbled spectacularly into dust and collapsed onto the floor in complete disorder. After seeing this, it’s safe to say that Bill became a little less defiant.
“Because I’m so nice,” said the Second Law, “I just created more disorder than usual, so you have a head start on your sentence. But you still have to do the rest. Just remember: there’s no free lunch. Ever!”
With that, he disappeared.
“So, are you going to do it?” I asked.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Bill said with resignation. “Especially after seeing him destroy my machine so easily. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of someone like that.”
I nodded in agreement. “Well, I’m sorry your invention is, like, no more, Bill.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty sad.” But Bill was a tech nerd to the end. “On the bright side, watching all that hard work instantly turn to dust is the best example of entropy I’ve ever seen!”
