Pretend that you"re a firework display. You"re lighting up the dark sky with your dazzling brilliant lights and vivid colours. Thousands of people are watching you. They"re clapping and whistling and it's all because of you. Suddenly, you start to get dimmer. Your luminosity is muted. Ashes fall, and then you"re gone. Just like that.
That's what entropy is, the tendency to move towards confusion and disorder as time passes. The minute something is created, no matter how wonderful it is, it begins to be destroyed. For example, the moment you are born, you begin to die. Everything has an end.
In October Sky, Mr. Hickam said that the hardest thing he ever learned was entropy. He realised that the place where he was brought up, the place that was in his blood, was going to cease to exist in the near future. Coalwood was a resourceful town, full of good coal and good miners, but it, like everything else, had to run its course. It was nearing the end of its reign and Mr. Hickam knew that. He wasn't ready to accept the fact that it was happening, that entropy- a term that sounds so foreign, so remote- was going to be applied to his life. That's why it was difficult for him to learn. His job was ending, he was going to have to leave the place where he was brought up, the coal mines that he loved so much were no longer going to be his. He was going to have to create a completely new future, and that must have scared him. I know it would have scared me. .