Welcome to another exciting installment here at The Rusted Muffler, your favorite car blog for high-level technical automotive expertise. Today, we’re talking about identity crisis. And omelettes.
Are you suffering from some sort of unidentified internal dissonance? Do you block out thinking about what’s really bothering you by buying more cars or car parts? Spending way too much time reading about, looking at, talking about, or fixing cars? Then you’re probably what they call an ‘automotive enthusiast,’ like me.
I just spent the last half-year or so fixing my car and having a great time avoiding confrontation with my inner self. But now, the car works again. Mostly. It has a check engine light sometimes and the front suspension makes a lot of interesting noises. Some call that ‘dangerous,’ but I call it ‘personality’. Either way, I’m too broke for more parts or another car. So I’m left wondering who I am, and what the hell I’m doing with my life.
My mind wanders the possibilities of who I want to be, what I want to do, and the likelihoods of it actually happening. I keep regressing into orbit around an old idea from Physics III, in a lesson taught by a Professor Morrison. It was about a decade ago, back in my undergrad days.
Morrison walked slow, talked even slower, always had a cigar to chew on, and fell asleep during every exam. At the end of each lecture he would say:
“You can do the homework, do well on the exam, get an A in the class, graduate, get a good job, and buy a BMW. Or… “
He paused like the kind of person who has never hit the speed limit or rolled a stop sign. His face looked so utterly exhausted all the time, you were never sure if he was going to pass out right there on his feet
“… or you can not do the homework, not do well on the exam, not graduate, no job, no BMW, and live in a cardboard box on Lower Wacker. Up to you.”
Then he’d walk out. He was the first to leave, every time.
Now that I’ve grown older and more acquainted with automotive culture, Morrison’s weekly reminders aren’t as clear as I used to think. The reason is simple. Those of you familiar with BMWs already know that the cardboard box is a far more reliable machine.
But that has almost nothing to do with our subject. What I brought to share with you today is Morrison’s lesson on entropy.
Consider an egg. It’s uncooked, still all up in its shell. Do you see it?
Now, imagine that the egg has fallen to the floor. The shell is broken, and its insides are oozing outward.
Here’s the kicker.
Can that egg gather itself back up and become whole again? Can it come back together?
If you were to ask any sane person, they would say, ‘no.’ Or, they might not even bother saying anything, they might just give you a strange look, wonder why you just broke an egg at their party, kindly escort you outside, and never speak to you again. However, if you were to ask a student of physics this same question, it would behoove them to reply, ‘yes.’
Yes, physically speaking, the egg can come back together. I took a surface understanding of this lesson to heart, and lived with that simple premise: anything is possible.
It’s worked out pretty good, I guess. I have the love of my family and friends, my girlfriend is amazing, my friends are solid, my car doesn’t die like it used to, my job is unfulfilling but not too demanding, my net worth is a dick hair above zero, and I’ve only had one major psychotic break so far. Not bad!
And when I was still fixing my car I almost forgot about the bouts of crippling despair that boil over into seething anger, how I’m paralyzed by the palpable grip of self-resentment festering inward, growing as it feasts on all my old hopes and dreams, how it used to be just obvious depression and anxiety but now it’s something worse, deeper, a demon parasitically intertwined with my soul, hiding in the shadows of nightmares. I think about pictures of myself from back when I was a kid through now, and I wonder when I forgot how to smile.
It turns out we can actually calculate the odds of the egg coming back together. It’s just an estimate, but Morrison showed us how, with a few quick assumptions and simple equations, we could get to within at least the right order of magnitude.
The odds are about 1 out of 101,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
That means that if you flipped a coin one billion times, then repeated each one of those billion flips a billion times each, then did each one of those billion billions a million times each, you’d then still have to count that total so far, start back at 10, then keep multiplying by 10 that many times. That would give you the total amount of coin flips you would need so that during one of them, the egg might come back together.
But on the plus side, it wouldn’t matter if it’s heads or tails.
Those are about the same odds of me becoming a successful writer. But shooting in the dark for something that might be there is better than not shooting at all. Anything is possible. As I sat trying to punch through the writer’s block to deliver some great new content for my audience of zero (and counting), I kept thinking, there has to be a better way.
Morrison’s egg was calling me back. I dusted off the old notebook and read. It unearthed ancient memories, none of which satisfied my distress. Diving deeper, I went for an educational swim in the sea of knowledge we call the internet (wow. that sentence was horrible). Every symbol of the equation was there for a reason, every assumption defined a constraint, and I wouldn’t stop until I made sure I understood it all.
About thirteen beers in, I realized my error.
The odds aren’t wrong. But those are the odds for the egg to come back instantaneously.
But what if…
What if we scraped up the splattered egg. We made sure to get every last bit. The pieces were then all broken down to their constituent molecules, then further into individual atoms, stabilized, and stored securely. It took a lot of research, but we figured out how each and every component of an egg, biological and structural, was made. We had to vat-grow a shitload of chickens. A lot of savants and intelligent people with ambivalent morals were given high-paying jobs to figure it out. It took decades, and cost the resources and GDP of several small countries, which, sadly, also had to be ‘disassembled’ in the process. We gave all the former residents vouchers to buy BMWs so they’d stop complaining so much. As a result of this massive effort, we were able to construct the machinery needed for creating perfect egg replicas, precise on an atomic level. And finally, we took the stored remains of that original broken egg and…
I woke up covered in beer cans and my girlfriend came home and yelled at me for a while. My head hurt, but I felt a whole lot better overall.
What are the odds of her not being mad at me again instantaneously? Start flipping coins and good luck.
Anything is possible, but only with strategy.
For example, the first step is making sure she gets some coffee. And definitely a snack, too. Show her a few pictures of dogs. Then the odds are a little better. And with each tactical move, I’m one step closer to not being in deep shit.
It’s really an old thought that we’ve known for longer than we can recollect. But sometimes even old thoughts can feel new, when we’ve glimpsed a tiny fragment of the universal language that describes their foundation.
I forgot to write anything about omelettes.