I should teach the world the second law of thermodynamics - that spontaneous changes are accompanied by an increase of entropy, an increase in disorder. Thus rooms, houses, offices, etc, all tend to become untidy. Left to themselves, houses deteriorate and are subject to rot. Such events are preventable, but only if work is put into the system. It takes work to tidy offices. It takes work to maintain property.

More importantly, the law applies to life itself. Living organisms are in a metastable state, and are maintained by taking nutrition. The final thermodynamic state of life is death, and the distribution of the constituent elements and compounds in the environment - leaving a small, inorganic, solid residue. That this does not come about quickly is because of the continual acquisition of nutrition, which provides the free energy to maintain the living system.

The application of the second law of thermodynamics to life tells us that anything we wish to maintain needs the input of work. Otherwise, we drift into the final thermodynamic state, and become part of the recycling systems of the elements. For example, all the carbon atoms enter the environment as carbon dioxide, which acts as nutrition to vegetation. This then offers nutrition to other beings in metastable states, and here we go round again. The good people of Yorkshire, particularly those living near Ilkley Moor, have a song about it!

Jack Barrett is coauthor of Fundamentals of Inorganic Chemistry (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).