Circle of Chaos

Antara Dasgupta

Order in chaos or chaos in order,
Clausius’s demon or Boltzmann or Shannon.
Uncertainty is everywhere,
but we can measure the disorder.
Or let’s shift perspective,
to Schrödinger and Wiener,
or with negentropy flow back to Prigogine.
Laws of thermodynamics seal the deal,
bringing us back to the start,
of the circle in which we live.
Constant energy flows, invisible to the eye,
relentlessly moving, silently flowing by.
Life feeds on negative entropy,
from cellular to mental, we are living chaos.
We need to consume order,
just to get by.
The pandemic presents infinite uncertainties,
life now offers no order to consume.
Information is eliminated uncertainty.
So when chaos surrounds us,
both without and within,
Is seeking information together,
the only way to win?

The Science

In this poem, I connect to the current human crisis during the pandemic, the uncertainties that threaten to derail us each day, and yet, also acknowledge that life is nothing if not uncertain. In the information age then, what does it mean to pursue orderliness, and can the pursuit of information bring this orderliness that we inherently seek? These are the questions that inspired this poem called the Circle of Chaos, stemming from a recent article written by Wu et. al. in 2020, where they philosophically analyse the meaning and nature of entropy and negentropy. The study, published in the Hindawi journal Complexity, concluded that entropy and negative entropy relate to the degree of disorderliness in the information rather than the information itself.

The Poet

Antara Dasgupta is a New Delhi born Indian poet, interested in sci-art and sci-comm, and living in Osnabrück, Germany. She is a researcher by day and works on flood forecasting and monitoring using satellite data, explicitly examining the role and representation of uncertainty. She loves being ‘punny’, and writes under the pseudonym ‘Skepticynic’ and her blog Poetic Licence to Kill, where she shares her poems as they come to her.

Next poem: Cranial Landscape Danger Zone by Linda Hutsell-Manning