Scene. I run towards you with piles and piles of handwritten notes and formulas. I shout, “I HAVE CRACKED THE CODE!!”
For those who are new here, I adore physics. I wrote the following a while back, but I think it still rings true: “To study physics is to seek the beauty of matter, to study the intricacies of the universe. It truly asks you to revere whoever, or whatever made any of this possible, and it is the closest way for us to understand how all of this came to be.”
So today, while doing some daily pondering, I connected the dots between thermodynamics and love: to examine feelings in a scientific, empirical way, through the lens of entropy. This is the biggest “hear me out” I’ve done in a while, but please, sit back, and hear me out.
For those unfamiliar, the First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system; it can only be transformed from one form to another.
People often describe love as this unexplainable, irrational phenomenon that lives beyond logic. But to me, minimizing the importance of love is the worst thing you can do to yourself. It makes up such a massive part of the human experience; why wouldn’t it follow the same laws as everything else in the universe?
I think feelings, like all energy, obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Take grief, for instance. The residue of love left behind after something ends. Death, the loss of a relationship, the closing of a life stage: these are just transformations of energy. Like that quote from Wandavision says, “Grief is love persevering.” The remaining love doesn’t vanish. It follows you and haunts you. Like Catherine with Heathcliff.
So when someone accuses me of “not getting over it,” I’m sorry, but I am someone who loves hard and grieves even harder. I am not embarrassed by my grief. It isn’t the subject of the grief that haunts me; it’s the memory of the person I was because of who they were to me. The ache comes from knowing I could have loved that much. And though we can rise from the ashes again and again, the version of me who once was will always exist somewhere, preserved in the energy of that love.
This is why I believe in ghosts. Not in their literal existence (I’m Catholic, I only believe in demons), but in the energetic kind. The energy of someone, or something, you loved deeply never truly leaves. It’s the energy of grieving that haunts: the love that has transformed but not disappeared.
And that, ladies and gents, is the First Law of Thermodynamics: Love cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system; it can only be transformed from one form to another.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is even more interesting. The Second Law adds that in any real (irreversible) process, some energy becomes unavailable for doing useful work: it disperses, becoming random thermal motion.
Entropy is the measure of chaos or disorder in a system. Low entropy means more order; high entropy means more disorder. Solids have low entropy, liquids have more, and gases have the most.
Entropy is emotional “chaos energy”, or expansiveness. Gases are single. Liquids are talking. Solids are relationships.
And so, if the first law teaches us that love, like energy, cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed, then the second law teaches us something even more tragic, and more beautiful: Love is always moving toward entropy. Toward expansion. Toward dissolution.
But entropy isn’t the death of love, it’s diffusion.
It’s love learning to exist beyond its original container. And that is such a high-order concept to me, because oftentimes we recognize the diffusion of matter as noticing the negative spaces.
A relationship, a moment, a body… all of these are vessels that eventually can’t hold the energy anymore. The bonds loosen, the molecules drift apart, and suddenly that love, that once felt like it could collapse the universe into a single heartbeat, begins to spread.
It seeps into other things: the scent of a shirt, a song you can’t skip, a stranger’s kindness that feels inexplicably familiar.
That’s entropy. That’s love refusing to disappear. People think entropy means chaos, but what if it means freedom? What if every heartbreak is just the system reaching equilibrium, love finding new forms of order we can’t yet perceive? Maybe that’s why grief feels so vast: because it’s love uncontained, the heart realizing it’s no longer a closed system. The energy spills out, unstoppable, everywhere.
I think about this a lot. How, in losing someone, the world doesn’t become emptier. It becomes fuller. Every corner haunted by what once was. Every silence vibrating with what still is. I think about my ghost haunting the people I lost, the same way theirs haunt me.
Because love never really end. Like all matter, it just changes phase.
It freezes, melts, evaporates, condenses again. It rises, falls, and finds its way back to us in softer forms. Maybe that’s why sometimes we wake up calm for no reason… as if some distant part of the universe remembered us, and the energy made its way home. Perhaps that’s also why you lie awake at night thinking about that one person. It’s that same haunting coming back to you to remind that you are capable of so much love.
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And I’ll leave you with this poem I wrote earlier this year, one that feels like the closing stanza of this theory:
All love is never lost.
Some love is frozen
locked in winter’s grasp,
molecules clutching each other
like hands unwilling to let go.
It waits in the frost, untouched,
preserved but distant,
a memory encased in ice.
Some love melts
it runs, reshapes, bends,
a river without a destination.
It kisses the earth, fills empty spaces,
becomes something new with every twist and turn.
Some love burns
it flares too bright, too fierce,
petrifying those who do not dare to hold the scathing flame.
It cracks open, shatters,
then vanishes into the air, unseen.
But even then, it lingers
a whisper in the wind, a shimmer in the heat,
weightless but waiting.
But love never disappears.
It rises, condenses, falls again,
a cycle written in the sky,
etching itself into the delicate fog on your window,
waiting to be seen
Even in atomic moments,
what once seems lost returns, softened, purified,
is always ready to flow back into your heart,
never far from eternity.
And when we eventually leave this Earth,
our love metamorphoses into plasma
the aurora australis, or distant stars light-years away, immortalized.
Boundless, free of sorrow,
it dances on the edge of eternity.
And those who remain will feel your love’s tender caress,
like moonlight on their skin.
And maybe, at the end of all things, when the stars cool and the universe reaches its quiet equilibrium… love will remain.
Not as heat or light, but as the faintest hum in the cosmic background, the echo of every person who ever loved and was loved in return.
So when I say all love is never lost, I mean it literally. The First Law guarantees it, the Second explains it.
Love is the universe’s favorite trick, an infinite cycle of transformation, never-ending, always becoming. The universe tends toward disorder. Every closed system drifts from structure to chaos. And love, too, resists stillness. The longer it lasts, the more entropy it must navigate. Relationships dissolve not because love dies, but because systems change, energy disperses. What was once perfectly ordered, like two people orbiting one another, may, over time, expand, like heat radiating into the cold night.
But here’s the beautiful subversion: entropy is not just decay. It is evolution. It is movement. Entropy allows love to flow beyond its initial container: to move from body to body, to ripple through memory, art, faith. The “disorder” of love is what makes it universal. It leaves the boundaries of the two and joins the infinite.
The First Law is love’s permanence. The Second Law is love’s diffusion.
Love expands. It breaks order not to destroy meaning, but to spread it. Every heartbreak increases the entropy of the soul: but in doing so, the soul becomes large enough to hold the entire world.
And scene.