Solid statistics collected for over two decades, validate the
observation that I must belong to the top 95 percentile of population when it
comes to the ability to come up with good jokes. (And I figure somewhere in the
50 percentile range on the parameter of modesty)
Anyways, so the thing is, my jokes usually get at least three
laughs on an average. That is the usual trend. However, my last joke was not
very appreciated. In fact, Ksh proceeded to laugh at it,
instead of laughing because of its high humor quotient. It was obvious that I
feel offended. So the thing goes like this:
It has been said that given sufficient amount of time, an infinite
number of monkeys on typewriters can reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare
(Infinite Monkey Theorem). So
the question is – this theorem is in violation of which law of physics?
.
.
.
.
The answer is – The second law of Thermodynamics.
Let me explain. A monkey on a typewriter punching random keys will
produce garbage. Garbage has a tendency to remain garbage even if its
constituents are reassembled. Hence, it has high randomness and thus high entropy. On the contrary, any
piece of work by Shakespeare is very unique in its specifications. Any changes
shall result in ruining the entire thing. So it has no randomness at all and thus very low entropy. Now, the
second law implies that over time, systems tend to go from low entropy to high. Hence, the law kind of says that contrary to the infinite monkey theorem, given sufficient amount of time, a number of Shakespeare clones will produce large amounts of garbage.
QED
1 comment:
Observation to support the hypothesis: Monkeys in the modern office premises never meet the deadline, no matter how far is the deadline or how simple is the task, leave aside the "Shakespeare's works".
Post a Comment