Baha'is believe that the world goes through cycles where everything collapses, forcing us to rebuild and start again, like a phoenix.
That's true - the natural tendency of any system is towards chaos, so any order achieved is temporary and doomed to fail. Personally I think western society works in approximately 300-year cycles and we are at the start of the third cycle since 1400. The 1700-2000 cycle was based on scientific reasoning and the pursuit of perfection as deemed by man rather than a god or gods. I think it will move now to an acceptance of imperfection and differences. We have to deal with who we really are rather than as it is prescribed to us.
Life in the 21st century
2 comments:
"The tendency of any system is towards chaos" is a general misrepresentation of the second law of thermodynamics - that the total entropy in a closed system will not decrease, entropy being the dispersal of energy over time. Or "Energy spontaneously tends to flow only from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused or dispersed and spread out."
Is a closed bulb filled with gas more "chaotic" if the gas (energy) is dispersed _evenly_ throughout its volume?
But in any case, we do not live in a closed system, thus allowing for external influences - like cooling that bulb above (which is now no longer a closed system, since we're acting on it externally), causing the gas to liquify, and concentrate in the bottom of the bulb, and a vacuum in the rest of it. Is this more or less chaotic/disorderly than the above?
Of course, now the vacuum causes the bulb to implode and you have to clean the disorderly mess up off the carpet...did I just destroy (pun intended) the point I was trying to make? :)
Perhaps we need to spend some more time in that scientific reasoning cycle :D
Not a scientific discussion at all - the point being that systems do not work over the long term due to human nature. We're probably more prone to dispersal than atoms anyway as we are more diverse in our make-up.
I haven't touched science since I graduated - I'll leave it there lol
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