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Epilogue
Seventeenth century thinkers described the universe as a decaying
creation, a remnant of a paradise corrupted by sin.  The world, they said, had
been crafted as a perfect and unblemished sphere.  Then Adam and Eve had
stolen fruit from the tree of knowledge.  A roaring, wrathful God had thrown
the primal pair out of Eden and visited his anger upon the newly-conceived
planet.  He had smashed the surface of this perfect place, leaving the
wound-like gashes of valleys and the upturned pustules of mountains as
eternal signs of His displeasure.  Ever since that time, said the philosophers,
the earth has been decaying like an ancient ruin, showing only the faintest
signs of a beauty that was no more.
Nineteenth Century physicists expressed the old view in a new way.
They created the concept of entropy.168  All matter, said the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, tends toward chaos.169  Leave the most carefully contrived
bit of complex form alone, and it will slowly be devoured by decay.  The
universe, said these scientists, is like a sugar cube.  Drop the
highly-structured block of sweetness into a glass of water, and it will
dissolve in a random swarm of glucose molecules, a liquid swirl of chaos.
So, too, said the physicists, will the world we know someday disappear,
eaten away by entropy.170
The Renaissance thinkers and the 19th Century scientists were both
wrong.  The universe has not been drifting from order into chaos.  It has,
instead, been marching in the opposite direction.  Since its first second of
being, the cosmos has coughed up fresh forms of creation.  From an
explosion of energy it spun one of its first great leaps forward--the atom.
Then came another extraordinary innovation--the molecule.  Billions of years
later, the universe spat forth another brilliant twist--a molecule that could
produce copies of itself, the molecule responsible for life.  And three billion
years beyond that, the universe conceived an even more revolutionary
upward step: intelligence.
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