I went through a big beatnik phase in high school, which is the time to do it. Around the time we were learning the concept of entropy in physics class, I remember reading this quote by Jack Kerouac:

“Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.”

This quote, coupled with my newfound knowledge that the universe is slowly crumbling into disorder, gives you a sense of what I felt was in store for me as an adult.

(I know what you’re thinking, but I was—and continue to be—extremely fun.)

Imagine my relief, then, to learn that there may be an additional law at work. In Time’s Second Arrow, geoscientist Robert M. Hazen and planetary scientist and astrobiologist Michael L. Wong lay out an argument for a new law of nature—one that accounts for all the dazzling complexity we see around us.  

In 2024, I had the pleasure of helping Mike prepare to speak at TEDxNewEngland (watch his wonderful talk here). Mike is a talented science communicator, jumping from macro-scale cosmology to atomic-scale chemistry with ease.

It was from Mike that I learned that many of the minerals on Earth coevolved with life, such that about a third of the 6,000 minerals on earth did not exist before interactions with living systems that have themselves evolved. 

His and Dr. Hazen’s new book explores the similarities that underlie all evolving systems—life, atoms, minerals, and beyond—from the birth of the universe to today, and the mechanisms by which systems persist.

Ultimately, the authors propose a new natural law of nature. Like the second law of thermodynamics, the law that gave us entropy, it is directional in time. Unlike entropy, it explains how more complexity can arise from less. It hinges on an increase in functional information, or the probability that a given configuration could achieve a specific function.

Now, at this point my teenage self might have thought: Not all systems that evolve are good. Some of them are harmful and need to go. Some products are too persistent, like plastics and PFAS. Living in a universe where bad things are evolving is just as depressing as living in a universe solely bent on decay.

And she might have been right. But I appreciate the full, rich picture of the universe this work portrays. As the authors write, “What if we choose to see life and atoms and rocks and planets and atmospheres and language and science as one connected, universal phenomenon of cosmic evolution?”

To think of poetry and technology as subject to the same evolutionary forces as redwood trees and Komodo dragons strikes me as exceedingly beautiful. And when much around us feels like it’s crumbling, I am finding it hopeful to focus on what we can build.