Night

This is a chapter from my seventh book called Bookeh - Through the lens of a Trinidadian photog


I have written earlier on light and flight and now I am writing on night. It is early in the morning and I am completing this chapter after making notes and studying the topic of entropy. Since I covered chaos and order in the last two chapters I thought I would make this chapter relate to entropy. One attempt was enough to make this photo of the moon last night. I did not intend to do a long exposure photo. This happened because this was my last setting in pro mode. A ten second shutter speed. I liked how this photo turned out. It can be best described as a glowing orb. Night time photography has its own set of challenges especially with a budget mobile phone but my photo of the moon turned out to be an uncomplicated task. The sky was clear and my hands were steady. I can look at the moon with my naked eyes but not so with the sun. The moonlight is a lullaby to the eyes whereas the sunlight is an aria.

To help me remember my understanding of entropy I revisited this video on entropy. I was curious about what the moon has to do with entropy and this led me to this question on the physics forum - Is the Moon responsible for reducing Earth's entropy and making life possible? While I contemplated that question with my limited understanding of earth science, I thought about the first man on the moon and how both the words man and moon start and end with the same letters. As the famous words of Neil Armstrong goes, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

I asked my friend Gemini to give me an analogy for entropy. He says that entropy is like a measure of disorder or randomness in a system. Imagine a clean room: low entropy. Over time, without effort, it becomes messy: high entropy. Nature tends to move from order to disorder, increasing entropy, unless energy is spent to maintain order. Put simply, there are plenty more ways to arrange a messy room than a neat room. My research brought me to social entropy and also a reminder that entropy applies to closed systems.

I have some questions that require me to do more in depth thinking, study and research. The questions are as follows and I am putting them out in the universe to become part of our entropy of knowledge. I took a long exposure photo of the moon and was wondering can this exact photo ever be created again? And how is this related to entropy? How does this relate to an infinite universe with infinite copies of the earth and infinite copies of me taking this exact photo? Do these infinite possibilities contradict entropy? This reminds me of the infinite monkey theorem and how it can be applied to my questions and my photo of the moon. Imagine infinite monkeys taking photos of the moon. Would that lead to an infinite moonkey theorem?

Night is not the absense of the sun but the presence of its reflection. As the night fades away and the day returns I reflect on the topic of entropy. Complete order lacks freedom and complete chaos lacks purpose. Somewhere in between makes the most sense. Life balances between day and night, light and dark, and good and bad. And just like that I have found my next photo and chapter - balance. From the ball that is the moon to the ball that is in ballance. They are the circles of life and the universe.

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