The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford Landmark Science)

by Roger Penrose

Clearly this casts doubt on the original argument. We have not deduced the second law. What that argument actually showed was that for a given low-entropy state (say for a gas tucked in a corner of a box), then, in the absence of any other factors constraining the system, the entropy would be expected to increase in both directions in time away from the given state (see Fig. 7.6). The argument has not worked in the past direction in time precisely because there were such factors. There was indeed something constraining the system in the past. Something forced the entropy to be low in the past. The tendency towards high entropy in the future is no surprise. The high-entropy states are, in a sense, the ‘natural’ states, which do not need further explanation. But the low-entropy states in the past are a puzzle. What constrained the entropy of our world to be so low in the past? The common presence of states in which the entropy is absurdly low is an amazing fact of the actual universe that we inhabit – though such states are so commonplace and familiar to us that we do not normally tend to regard them as amazing. We ourselves are configurations of ridiculously tiny entropy! The above argument shows that we should not be surprised if, given a low-entropy state, the entropy turns out to be higher at a later time. What should surprise us is that entropy gets more and more ridiculously tiny the farther and farther that we examine it in the past!

We are the product of a lack of entropy.