Et in Arcadia Ego

Emryse Geye

“When you stir your rice pudding...the spoonful of jam spreads itself round
making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you
stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not
notice and continues to turn pink. Do you think this is odd?...You cannot stir
things apart.”

— Tomasina Coverly, at breakfast in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia

The Second Law of Thermodynamics does not
presume to dictate that which is not made of matter
and yet, we still call the beginning of an affair the spark:
the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that heat
can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without
some other change connected therewith.
It means that heat goes only one way.
It means that things can only get colder.
It means that ever since the Big Bang,
things have been steadily cooling off.
In the beginning, (scientists don't really know

what happened, but moments afterwards
we do know that) there was a great big heat.
This heat powered the reactions that
combined to form the creatures which
evolved into the people which, eventually,
became you. At the beginning of you and I,
well, we don’t know what happened either,
but there was a whole lot of heat, and the
Second Law of Thermodynamics says this
is a law of endings, is a death sentence,
is the final countdown, is the slowest sigh:

things will be hot until they aren’t—
your coffee, your summers, your Earth’s core
—will be hot until they inevitably aren’t
until icecaps are oceans are deserts are stardust,
until thermal equilibrium. Your love is hot
until it isn’t: that lingering glance makes rational,
room-temperature people spontaneously combust,
makes spark, makes heat out of nothing
makes cold into warm, makes Big Bang
makes entire universe that can only cool down.
The universe as we know it will cease to exist

when all heat is equally distributed, when all
of everything is effectively room temperature:
the reactants are there, but there's not enough
heat left to power movement, collision, reaction.
A relationship as we know it, will cease to exist
when it becomes room temperature: you and I
are still here, but there's not enough heat left for
kisses. The Second Law states that while the
energy of the universe is constant, the entropy
—the disorder—tends towards the maximum:
it means all of our letters and dried flowers are
dispersed between our homes, but you cannot
collect cream by stirring your coffee backwards,
you cannot make bodies that have cooled keep
giving to bodies that are warm, and you cannot
run the other way so fast that you would give
me back what we’ve lost—you cannot stir
things apart—candles burn out no matter how
tall no matter how bright leaving us all in the
dark because the Second Law says that we are
all doomed says heat death that the sun will
burn itself out and we will all freeze says bed
death that you and I will burn ourselves out
and our love will freeze in the sheets because
heat goes only one way which means you will
love me brightest and hottest until you don't
until the candle the bed or the very sun burn out

The Science

The second law of thermodynamics governs the concept of entropy and the natural flow of energy--namely that there is a spontaneous tendency of energy to dissipate--hot to cold, motion to stillness. The heat death of the universe hypothesis extrapolates from this that with time, all energy in the universe will dissipate, and therefore eventually the universe will reach a state of thermal equilibrium where there will not be a sufficient enough energy differential with which to power the necessary reactions for life. Currently, this is the favoured hypothesis on the ultimate fate of the universe (and all it contains.)

The Poet

Emryse Geye (she/her) is a chemistry graduate student and poet from the Pacific Northwest, currently attending Portland State University. Her recent publications include the Fall 2018 issue of Voicemail Poems and the 2019 anthology Spectral Lines: Poems about Scientists from Alternating Current Press. More of her work can be found at emryse.com or @emryse on Instagram.

Next poem: Expansion by Meg Freer