I am dah law...

Hill Theory and the Philosophy of Uplooking

Michael Palin says:

“My view of the world, really, is that if you screw your eyes up and look at the world, it is an absurd and extraordinarily silly place, with everyone taking themselves very seriously.”

To try and live in world that is clean and tidy, and decay free, and explicable, and without loose ends and unfinished business, is to descend into misery and madness.

Up on them there hills, there's no end of people offering explanations (and, in most cases, eternal life). There's Pope Hill, Alah Hill, God Hill, Vishnu Hill, Thatcher Hill, there's even Henman Hill (now Murray Mount). There's Genius Hill, too, where they tell us that the laws of thermodynamics are all we need to understand, in order to understand everything else:

The Laws

The 0^th Law: If two systems are in thermal equilibrium separately, with a third system, they must be in thermal equilibrium with each other.

The 1^st Law: Heat is a form of energy. Because energy is conserved, the internal energy of a system changes as heat flows in or out of it.

The 2^nd Law: The entropy of any isolated system never decreases. Such systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium — the state of maximum entropy of the system.

The 3^rd Law: The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero. With the exception of glasses the entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically close to zero, and is equal to the log of the multiplicity of the quantum ground state.

Just the four laws, understand them and you understand all there is to know. Law 2 is particularly important. What do they actually mean?

Here's some versions in layman's terms (the numbers vary):

First
Law:		You can't bet unless you play.

Second
Law:	The most you can hope for is to break even.

Third
Law:		You can't break even.

Fourth
Law:	Once you're born, you can't even get out of the game!

First
Law:		You can't get anything without working for it.

Second
Law:	The most you can accomplish by work is to break even.

Third
Law:		You can't break even.

1.
You can't win.

2.
You can't even break even.

3.
You can't get out of the game.

4.
THE LAW OF ENTROPY: The perversity of the universe tends towards a
maximum.

Understand (4) above, and that's all you need to know. There's only one state in which your coffee cup is an intact coffee cup, and millions of states where it's shattered in pieces all over the floor. Eventually, every cup gets broken. Beware anyone, politician or god-botherer, telling you they've got a solution, 'cos there 'aint one. There's no peace without accepting entropy.