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Ask HN: Why is it so hard to create and so easy to destroy?
- gvb 16y agoBecause creation fights the second law of thermodynamics, destruction "goes with the flow." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
- Throwaway74 16y agoI don't get it, could you elaborate further? By that premise, isn't creation just another form of destruction, just arbitrarily more complex because we see it that way? To put it another way, someone, somewhere once said that luck was people taking probability personally.
- endtime 16y agoNo single given state of the universe is more likely than any other single state, but very few states are actually interesting. Here's an analogy: If you were to generate a random bitmap, there's a possibility it could look like the Mona Lisa, or a picture of Obama tapdancing next to Churchill, or the exact schematics of Iran's Natanz nuclear facility...but it will almost certainly just look like random noise, because that's what the vast majority of states are. If you start from an interesting state and make random changes to it over time, obviously you'll tend towards a random state. And as I described above, randomly selecting a state has a high probability of yielding an uninteresting state.
- Throwaway74 16y agoSo, given that the universe is mostly made up by randomness and noise, anything path to noisiness is easier than a path to order ? Is this a fair way of putting it?
- swombat 16y agoWhy is this from a throwaway account anyway?
- Throwaway74 16y agoPosting anonymously somehow 'feels right' for this question. It was posted out of a sense of dispair, more of a dramatic scream at the universe really :)
- technomancy 16y agoThis is approximately the question G.K. Chesterton's "The Man who was Thursday" addresses. I won't spoil it and probably couldn't do it justice if I tried, but it's a compelling story.
- Throwaway74 16y agoWill definitely read the story, thanks!
- apedley 16y agoTechnically there is no difference. I guess it is how we perceive things. When we destroy we expect no specific outcome, hence you have a very large scope on what you will see as destruction. You can just blow something up and see everything fall down around. With creation you expect a specific outcome or result and hence the range of what you can do is generally more limited. I want to blow a small hole (create a hole) in a wall will require more planning. The basic actions to create or destroy are no different. So you could say destruction is done by those with no specific vision and creation is done by those with a well defined vision.