Catastrophes And Entropy Poem by gershon hepner

Unlike those neighborhoods men wish to gentrify,
no wilderness regains its first-growth timber;
catastrophes are not redeemed by entropy
and when transformed, a bang becomes a whimper.

I don’t recall what inspired this poem but it is perhaps a rebuttal of Paul C. W. Davies, a cosmologist from Macquarie University in Sydney who is now at Arizona State University. In a chapter written for the Templeton Foundation, he wrote:

“The richness and diversity of physical systems we observe today have emerged through the beginning through a long and complicated series of self-organizing and self-complexifying processes. Viewed this way, the conspicuous story of the universe so far is one of unfolding enrichment, not decay. One could define, say, a measure of organized complexity that increases with time even as entropy increases. Nothing within science compels one to favor entropy over organized complexity in characterizing the evolution of the universe.