The More Loving One: The Science of Entropy and the Art of Alternative Endings

“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” This essay and poem are now part of the Universe in Verse book. In 1865 — a year before the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology, the year Emily Dickinson composed her stunning pre-ecological poem about how life-forms come into being — the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined the word entropy to describe the undoing of being. The thermodynamic collapse of physical systems into increasing levels of disorde