Entropy…

The artist’s eye is truly a gift to us all: and so it is with our son-in-law, Dan. An artist first, Serials Librarian/Technologist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, second. His visual insight never fails to open up new ways of seeing our world.

In a recent post I’d mentioned the large burn pile at the garden. As with any large fire, an amazing display of energy… energy dissipated actually. That fire and specifically Dan’s photo of the glowing embers illuminated by the evening’s moonlight got me to thinking about thermodynamics and entropy–the stuff of quantifying the order and disorder of the universe.

The October 13th 2007 Economist ran a review of Oliver Morton’s new book Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet. Morton, a news editor at Nature, feels “that modern biology has become so focused on the movement of information, in the form of genes, that it has neglected the processes needed to move that information around: in essence, thermodynamics.” Even the briefest reflection on this photo reinforces that thesis: in an attempt to peer with a finer lens into the make-up of life, we are overlooking the much bigger picture.

Perhaps then, Al Gore is right: the macro view is the one that is the most important for humankind. What damage are we doing to our planet? Is it reparable? Good questions for us all.

And yet, as I finish writing this I can’t help but think that in the end, the artist’s eye might save us yet. His may be, in fact, the truest lens of all–not too fine or too course–tempered with a balance gifted through God’s grace.