Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Order and Disorder

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2003 17:58:15 -0400

Order and Disorder
By Robert W. Lucky

Ilove it when my little two-year-old granddaughter visits my home.  There is a
small price to pay, however. In the space of about a half hour, she can reduce the
house to a shambles. With great energy and enthusiasm, she rushes about, pulling
things from shelves and tables and throwing them on the floor.

Last time I got down on my knees and looked her in the eyes. I accused her of
being an agent of the second law of thermodynamics. I think she gave me a knowing
wink, but maybe it was my imagination. Patiently, I explained to her that she was
increasing the entropy in my house. I said that the second law required that
disorder should increase and spread in a closed system like my house. Perhaps it
needed a little occasional help from someone like her.

It was hard holding her attention. There were so many more things that needed
scattering, and so little time. She rushed off.  But I started thinking about
order and disorder. Apparently young children have no sense of the desirability of
structure in the world about them. When do we acquire this sense, I wondered, and
do we engineers have a special attraction to an ordered world?

An adult wouldn't tolerate all this junk on the floor. With maturity we learn that
it is better to collect it all and throw it in the bottom of a closet. Then the
world that is visible has order, while the disorder is confined to the unseen
world—sort of like the registry in Windows, I was thinking.

I sometimes think that our job as engineers is to impose structure on a resisting
natural world.  We're happy when we've reduced a complicated problem to a simple
model with underlying equations. We see beauty in a printed-circuit board with a
pleasing rectangular layout of parallel lines. We like our graphs to be straight
lines. We praise structured code, and the worst insult is to liken code or wiring
to spaghetti. We work relentlessly against the second law.

I think of the beauty of Steve Rice's mathematical theory of noise or of Shannon's
classic derivation of a simple capacity equation for a random channel—the creation
of virtual order from natural disorder. Lotfi Zadeh defined fuzzy logic and
reduced it to mathematical analysis. Chaos theory—which seems like an
oxymoron—became popular when we discovered strange attractors and predictable
behavior.

Where other people see a mess, we see the possibilities for a descriptive
underlying structure. As I look at the floor of my living room, strewn with
debris, for a moment I think like the engineer I am.  Perhaps I could model this.
My granddaughter seems to move at a fixed rate. At a given moment, only so many
objects are within reach. This number decreases with time as objects join their
companions on the floor. She can't throw things very far, and her throws are
regular in length and random in direction. The most recently strewn objects form a
circle around her position. This is starting to take shape. Now I'm happier with
the mess. It really obeys laws, so it's O.K.

I think we're uncomfortable when problems don't have neat solutions. When the real
world frustrates us, we make assumptions and propose simple models that may or may
not capture the true behavior. We grow up with courses where every problem has a
solution. I imagine the heresy of a textbook where some of the problems don't have
solutions. You look in the answer book, and it says, "This problem cannot be
solved with the information available—welcome to the real world."

Of course, the second law of thermodynamics really only applies to a closed
system, like the universe. So order can be achieved locally at the expense of
disorder elsewhere. I think engineers are like this, too. While our work seems to
involve the creation and imposition of structure, our environment often
disintegrates spontaneously around us. This makes the second law very happy.

I walk down the halls of my lab and peer into the offices. I can tell which are
those inhabited by engineers. Those are the offices where you can't find the desk
for the piles of paper and equipment. Sometimes I can't find the floor, either. On
the other hand, when I see a neat office with a clean desk, I know that this is an
office housing a financial person, a human resources person, or a top executive.

Perhaps we can't evade the second law after all—structure in our work, but chaos
in our environment. Speaking of environment, someone has to pick up all this junk
on my floor. Alas, it looks like a job for an engineer.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/jul03/refl.html

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