Old AcaDec Speech

Yup. This brought back a lot of memories. Giving this speech is when I found out I really, REALLY suck at public speaking. Had to speak in front of 5 judges and I ended up butchering my speech. Skipped so many lines, stood there awkwardly without saying anything for a good minute (it was only a 3-4 minute speech), and then completely mumbling and saying gibberish until they finally allowed me to stop. All the time and thought I put into my speech went to waste, but hey, at least I still like it 3 years later (though there would be things I would change), which can’t be said about any of my previous writings.

Keep in mind this is a speech, and it has to have some research and teach the judges about something of your choosing. Here goes:

 

Imagine walking into your room or office and finding everything a complete mess. Papers thrown everywhere, clothes scattered all over the floor. You decide to clean up and reorganize everything, and that takes the entire day to complete. You promise to keep it neat and tidy, but a week later, everything is just as messy as it was before, and you find yourself rolling up your sleeves to do it all over again. Disorganization happens all around us; we just don’t think about or notice it. When a bowl falls and breaks into pieces, when you mix hot and cold water, and even when you make Kool-Aid, you’re dealing with disorganization. The way to measure disorganization is through entropy. Entropy measures disorder, and the higher the disorder, the higher the entropy.

When you pour hot water into cold water, the hot water doesn’t just stay in one corner. It spreads out, moving around and mixing with the cold water molecules and creating disorganization. The result is equilibrium, or warm water. It reaches equilibrium because the fast-moving hot water molecules bump into the slow-moving cold water molecules and create medium-paced warm water molecules. It is true that entropy, or disorganization, keeps getting higher and higher until it reaches equilibrium and is unable to become any more disorganized. In fact, the idea of disorder increasing until equilibrium is actually better known as the second law of thermodynamics.

Another example would be if I had a new can of lemon-scented air freshener and started to spray the entire can in that corner. At first, all that lemony freshness would stay in that corner and only I would be able to smell it. But slowly, the smell of the air freshener will move towards the other corners of the room and you would be able to smell it too. The smell would keep spreading until every inch of this room smelled lemony fresh, and when that happens, entropy has reached its max and is at equilibrium because the molecules are now spread evenly throughout the room.

Now theoretically, all that lemony scent can eventually bump around and move back to the original corner, but the chances of that are so low that we can say it’s impossible. Entropy seems to go only one way, toward a state of higher disorder. When a diver dives into a pool of water, all that water that the diver displaces can suddenly move back and push the diver back out of the water and onto the diving board, but it has never happened. One common example is a melting ice cube. Water molecules in an ice cube are solid and stable, but as it melts the molecules become disorganized and start to lose the ice cube shape. Soon a puddle of disorganized water molecules is all that’s left, and the puddle won’t be able to turn back into an ice cube by itself.

So if everything in this world is trying to reach maximum entropy, or disorganization, what will happen to our lives? Our planet? Our universe? The answer is that eventually we will reach the heat death of the universe. This means that there will be no difference between hot and cold. Everything would be the same temperature. We won’t be able to do any “mechanical work,” like moving our hands, walking, picking things up, speaking, and even breathing. You might be wondering what heat has to do with moving around, and there is a simple explanation for that. The sun shines its rays on a field of grass. The grass uses the heat energy from the sun to grow and flourish. The cows in turn eat that grass to grow big and fat. We humans then turn the cows into hamburgers to eat. When we eat the hamburger, we get energy from it, and use that energy to move around and pick things up. If we were to ever reach the heat death of the universe, nothing would live. Luckily for us though, the chances of reaching the heat death of the universe is once in many many lifetimes of our universe.

So even though our world is bent on disorder, we manage to create order. We make things more efficient, like computers, refrigerators, light bulbs, and cars. But more surprisingly, we do this naturally through evolution. All living things are so complex and organized it’s a wonder how life was created. In the face of increasing disorder and chaos we living things have managed to find a way to become more complex, more organized, and more intelligent.