A living cell preserves an extraordinarily organised interior in a universe governed by increasing entropy. It maintains membranes, genetic information and complex biochemical processes, yet it does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because it is not an isolated system. It imports concentrated energy and organised matter, transforming them into heat, waste and degraded materials. Its internal order is therefore purchased through a greater production of disorder outside its boundaries. Life survives not by defeating entropy, but by exploiting it. This idea, associated with Schrödinger’s “negative entropy” and Prigogine’s dissipative structures, contains an uncomfortable lesson, every organised system has a metabolic cost, every zone of visible order generates disorder elsewhere.
The same principle applies to individual existence. Human beings construct internal order through routines, careers, identities, relationships and carefully defended narratives about themselves. Yet that order requires constant exchanges with the outside world. A person who closes himself to criticism, affection, uncertainty and unfamiliar ideas may preserve stability, but it is the stability of a crystal rather than the dynamic order of a flame. More disturbingly, personal equilibrium is often achieved by exporting disorder into less visible places. The professional who appears controlled in public may transfer his frustration to his family; the admired leader may depend upon the exhaustion of subordinates; one person’s tranquillity may be financed by another’s anxiety. The moral question is therefore not whether our lives appear orderly, but where the fatigue, conflict and damage required to preserve that order are ultimately deposited.
Scientific research offers an especially revealing example. A published article appears as an orderly progression from question to method, evidence and conclusion. In reality, every polished result normally rests upon failed experiments, rejected manuscripts, abandoned hypotheses, unusable datasets and intellectual dead ends. These are not merely signs that research has malfunctioned; they are often the unavoidable cost of discovery. A scientific culture that publishes only successful outcomes and reconstructs every project as a clean sequence of rational decisions conceals its own metabolism. For researchers, this is a liberating insight: uncertainty and failure are frequently part of the process rather than deviations from it. Original research exists between excessive order and excessive disorder. Too much order produces repetition and safe incrementalism; too much disorder produces incoherence. Discovery requires enough structure to accumulate knowledge and enough instability for something unexpected to emerge.
Universities reproduce this logic institutionally. They import funding, student ambition, academic labour and talent, transforming them into graduates, publications, technologies and prestige. Yet the crucial question remains: where does their disorder go? Institutional stability may depend upon precarious researchers, exhausted support staff, invisible doctoral labour and the transfer of uncertainty towards those least able to resist it. The university remains orderly because insecurity has been displaced downwards. Excellence therefore cannot be judged solely through rankings, publications and strategic plans. It must also account for abandoned researchers, bureaucratic overload, suppressed dissent and talent trained at public expense and then allowed to leave. A university may appear highly efficient precisely because it has become exceptionally skilled at concealing its entropy.
P.S. This argument also returns us to my 2021 post, The Success of Organisations in the Twenty-First Century Requires a Minimum of Rebellion and Chaos. A university that eliminates dissent, intellectual friction, failed experiments and uncomfortable voices does not become more orderly; it becomes scientifically dead. What passes for institutional stability is often merely stagnation protected by bureaucracy, conformity disguised as collegiality and intellectual cowardice systematically elevated into a dominant model of governance. https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/11/academia-portuguesa-necessita-de.html
