Death + Entropy

So, here's a new painting.
I did this one for Michelle Gates, who wants to publish the "Quantum Physics Tarot" deck later. (But a licence to publish this for other purposes such as CD covers etc. can still be bought!)
For that purpose topics of the quantum physics will be added to the traditional card images (as you may have guessed ), I think that's really a weird but great and unique idea (and every card will be painted by another artist!).




Here's the description of entropy, the main topic of this card:

Entropy is essentially disorder. Death is the disorder that occurs when life stops being able to put itself back into the ordered state in which it was in.

Physicists often refer to low entropy (ordered) states and high entropy states, or states with lots of disorder. Life is in a constant battle with entropy. In the universe, life forms are small pockets of very unusually low entropy, which is really very strange, because one of the essential laws of the universe is that entropy must increase. This is part of the second law of thermodynamics. So, in order for life to exist, it must shed entropy. It does this by taking in very ordered forms of energy (the sugars in food, sunlight) and shedding disordered energy in the form of heat. In this way life maintains its low entropy state by shedding entropy.

Also, entropy is correlated with time. The highly ordered state of the universe at the beginning is related to this and the universe is thought by some to eventually be 'unraveling' into a state of ultimate disorder, getting colder and colder as opposed to the very hot state it was in at the beginning.


Edit: I've uploaded the image with my homepage in it, sorry for that, but I have noticed that someone has uploaded it on facebook and pretended that he has painted it. So, I'm afraid, I'll have to do this with all my paintings in future...