Sean Carroll

I do want to get back to your book here.

Maintenance, the need for maintenance is built into the universe because of the second law of thermodynamics, right?

Things want to dissolve back into equilibrium.

And if we have a complex system doing something useful, we have to keep it from falling apart.

Is that a way of thinking about maintenance?

Well, you know, if entropy always increases in a closed system, the ultimate end state for anything is just equilibrium, right?

You know, the temperatures all smooth out, everything becomes kind of boring.

The kinds of things that are complex systems doing interesting things, whether they're mechanical or technological or biological...

are very, very, very far from equilibrium because they're in very specific organizational patterns.

And so there's a lot more ways for a machine to be broken than working.

That's an aspect of the second law.

So I take it that fighting against that can be thought of as what maintenance is all about in some spirit.

Yeah.

Well, you start the book with these wonderful examples of the sailing race.

I forget what the race was called, but the race that started in England.

Right, right.

And you picked on – there's several people who were in the race, but you chose three sailors.

These were solo trips literally circumnavigating the oceans.

And these three people you talk about had very different –

attitudes towards maintenance, and it showed.