I hope by now that you have all read The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. It is one of the most profound science fiction short stories ever written, because it has at its heart the core question of science and indeed existence:

Can entropy ever be reversed?

What is entropy?

It can be looked at in different ways. One is here: Entropy is a measure of the uniformity of the distribution of energy.

Or this:

Rooted in the second law of thermodynamics, entropy measures the disorganization in a system. It is essentially a commonsense law of probability: events with a high frequency occur more often than events with low frequency. Systems proceed from initial states of low probability to end states of highest probability or final equilibrium…

Imagine for example two separate containers of the colors blue and yellow with a valve connecting the two closed systems. When the valve is opened, molecules of each color advance to the other side. Over time, the two colors blend together to form a uniform green. Once the system reaches an equilibrium of greenness, there is no going back to the initial states of separate yellow and blue.

It is much the same when shuffling a deck of cards. Even with a well-defined initial sequence, this “closed system” quickly becomes disordered and confused. For the sake of simplicity, the act of shuffling consists of removing the top card and placing it back in the deck at random.

After one shuffle, the deck has changed to one of fifty-two alternatives, each strongly resembling the original order. After many repetitions, however, the original sequence will have been completely destroyed.

In this manner, order is relentlessly replaced by increasing disorder as closed systems degrade to more probable, less informative states. Simply put, entropy is a measure of lost information…

This passage is lifted from an elegant piece by Randall L Schweller, which takes this concept and applies it with much insight to international relations.

Try this:

What some call global governance is little more than a spaghetti bowl of clashing agreements brokered within and among thirty thousand or so international organizations of varying significance, from the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission to the United Nations.

One wonders how states make decisions and forge long-run strategies these days when it is virtually impossible for them to figure out where international authority over any issue resides, and which agreements, interpretations and implementations of rules and laws have salience and should come to dominate.

And this:

… the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way—roughly from West to East—is without precedent in modern history in terms of size, speed and directional flow. If these were the only processes at work, then the future of international politics might well conform to the benign, orthodox liberal vision of a cooperative, positive-sum game among states operating within a system that places strict limits on the returns to power.

But this is not to be because, in a break from old-world great-power politics, there will be no hegemonic war to wipe the international slate clean. We will therefore be stuck with the bizarre mishmash of global-governance institutions that now creates an ineffectual foreign-policy space. Trying to overhaul existing institutions to accommodate rising powers and address today’s complex issues is an impossible task.

So while liberals are correct to point out that the boom in global economic growth over the past two decades has allowed countries to move up the ladder of growth and prosperity, this movement, combined with a moribund institutional superstructure, creates a destabilizing disjuncture between power and prestige that will eventually make the world more confrontational…

Lots more where that came from. Terrific.

Read the whole thing if you are interested in the larger patterns and deeper trends and tendencies which help explain why Copenhagen was doomed to fail.