All photos via Martin Kaloshi

Martin Kaloshi
Science and Environment Editor

My glasses are going to fall off. 

I’m shoving my way past bodies shoving their way past me. Drums go feral and damp sweat gushes from our pores; I can taste the slight saline mist in the air. It’s kind of gross. I kind of like it. 

Last week, my very cool friends invited me to a punk rock show (my first of the like), to which I obviously said yes. And I’m glad I did, because that’s where it occurred to me that the mosh pit is a pretty special place. Moshing radiates a lovely, controlled kind of chaos; it’s a complete cathartic release, but also a space of trust where people will help fallen moshers in a heartbeat. Crowds move in all directions and arrangements, with respect only to the music. Here, chaos is the release and the connective force, and the whole point. 

The universe operates similarly.

Entropy is the scientific measure of disorder. Consider particles (or moshers) dispersing about a space. The more random and chaotic their arrangement, the higher the entropy.

Entropy is involved in the process of ice melting, for example. Think back to those phases of matter diagrams from high school. Solid particles were neatly packed together, those of liquids were a little more free to flail about, and those of gases were practically moshing mid-air. Solid ice crystals are highly ordered. When the spontaneous process of melting turns the particle order askew, we’ve reached a point of increased entropy. Enter: the liquid phase. 

Similarly, entropy describes why milk spreads and mixes with coffee, why a spritz of perfume will diffuse across a room, and why your room just can’t seem to stay clean for more than three business days. 

Of course, this is an oversimplification. It can be more accurate to think of entropy as a measure of probability.

Every system (an object or group of parts that work together as a whole, like an ice cube or a (moshing) human) is made up of tiny bits of matter: particles. At the microscopic level, these particles can be arranged in endless combinations. 

Our moshers may be spread out across the pit, a quarter of them on each corner. They may be collected in a bundle in the center. They may be perfectly arranged in rows and columns. They may form two lines at the pit’s east and west extremities. They may be in some, any, other formation. 

Probably, though, they’ll be sort of everywhere, chaotically intermingling and interbouncing and interpummelling and interyounameit. 

Entropy is simply the more probable distribution of matter. For the universe, it’s much easier to keep things a little messy. In fact, the universe fundamentally tends to increase its total entropy; because, as with ice melting, and coffee mixing, and rooms filthying, and moshers moshing, and all other processes, disorder prevails.

So, if entropy is so statistically inevitable, let’s all get a bit more warmed up to disarray. 

Tolstoy and Aristotle agreed some time ago that there’s strictly one path to perfection, while there are endless ways to go wrong. Now, we all have a choice to make: do we put in the impossible work to attain it, or do we come to terms with our chaos?

If you ask me, a clean room can wait until tomorrow. Tonight, you can find me in the mosh.