Disorder/Order: Discovery or Invention? - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 276

drilling, pumping, pulling, and things like that. But they also knew that the
smaller the temperature difference between these two containers is, the less
the chance of getting a heat engine going; this means that the possibility of
changing heat into work becomes less and less as the temperatures of the
two containers become more and more alike.
When Clausius thought about that very carefully, he realized what is
going on here: with the decrease in the difference between the two tem-
peratures, the convertibility, the change, the turning of heat energy into
work, becomes less and less possible. Therefore he wanted to give this pos-
sibility of being able to turn or to change heat into work a good and catchy
name. At that time it was very popular to use Greek for neologisms. So he
went to his dictionary and looked up the Greek for “change,” and “turn.”
He found the word trope . “Aha,” he said, “but I would like to talk about
not change , because, you see, the longer these processes go on, the less heat
can be turned into work.” Now unfortunately, either he had a lousy dictio-
nary, or he could not speak Greek very well, or he had friends who did not
understand what he was talking about. Instead of calling it utropy , because
ou is the Greek word for non , as in “Utopia” (no place)—and utropy is what
he should have called his new concept—for some reason he called it
“entropy,” because he thought that en is the same as the Latin in and there-
fore means “no.” That is why we are stuck with the wrong terminology. And
what is worse, nobody checked it! An incredible state of affairs! So, in
proper lingo , when these two containers are put together, the utropy of the
two increases, because the possibility for changing, for transforming the
heat into work becomes less and less.
A couple of years later, two gentlemen, one in Scotland, one in Austria,
one in Edinburgh, the other in Vienna, one by the name of Clerk Maxwell,
and the other by the name of Ludwig Boltzmann, were intrigued by a fas-
cinating hypothesis, a hypothesis which was so crazy that most of their col-
leagues in the academic community refused even to talk about that stuff.
They were contemplating whether it would be possible to think of matter
as not being indefinitely divisible, so that at a particular level of subdivi-
sion, one could not subdivide any further. That is, one would be left with
small pieces of mass. “Mass” is moles in Latin, and for a small thing, one
puts on the diminutive suffix, which is -cula , and we get the hypothetical
“molecules” that would not allow further division.
Contemplate whether this hypothesis makes any sense at all. To put you
into the perspective of that time, 1871 or 1872, Boltzmann, who was teach-
ing in Vienna, occupied one chair in physics. The other chair belonged to
Ernst Mach, whose name, I believe, is familiar to you. Mach went into the
Boltzmann lectures, sitting in the last row of the big physics auditorium, and
when Boltzmann used the word “molecule” in his lectures, Mach screamed
from the last row, “Show me one!” Of course, at that time one could not
show one; they were purely hypothetical. Anyway, these two gentlemen,
Maxwell and Boltzmann, addressed themselves to the problem of whether