STEM Chronicles November 2026: The Cosmic Tax: Entropy
From the Founder’s Desk
We say ignorance is bliss. It turns out that it is more scientifically accurate than we might think. Entropy rules the universe, and entropy, at its core, is a measure of our ignorance.
That is the idea at the heart of this November edition. The featured blog, The Cosmic Tax, follows entropy from the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution to the cells in our bodies and the arrow of time itself. Science has a way of humbling us with our ignorance. Progress is usually driven by people who could state precisely what they did not know and then worked on it through sheer conviction.
Prof. R. Lakshmi Narayan, Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi, and guest on this month’s Dialogues of Discovery, makes the same point. He says that artificial intelligence can model a material, but it cannot replace the physical experiment, and it cannot replace the researcher who notices when the model is wrong. Not knowing where you are headed is not a disqualification. It is usually the starting condition.
This year’s Nobel Prizes, covered in News Flash, continue with that thought: a light-sensitive protein found in a single-celled alga, neutrinos caught in a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice, and a century-old puzzle about mirror-image molecules finally settled.
The book review of Bill Bryson’s The Body reminds us how much remains unknown about something as ordinary as pain, and the Fun Zone, with the Connections Puzzle, is the place to test what you do know!
Science runs on unknowns, and if there is one habit that I hope the students who read this edition take away into their lives, it is the ability to say “I don’t know yet” confidently and have the courage to seek out the answers themselves.
Happy reading, and Happy Festivities!
Dr. Sonali Dasgupta
Founder, STEMonsters Education
In This Issue
- Featured Blog: The Cosmic Tax: Entropy
From Carnot’s steam engines and Clausius’s Second Law to Boltzmann’s statistics, Schrödinger’s negentropy, the arrow of time and Shannon’s information entropy. Written by N P Vismaya. Art by Naina Carvalho; cover art by Kavya Das. - Dialogues of Discovery: Prof. R. Lakshmi Narayan
Associate Professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, IIT Delhi, on metallic glasses, 3D-printed alloys, fatigue in aircraft and turbines, and the role of AI in research. Interview by Sooktha Shastry and Srishti Biswas. - News Flash: The Nobel Prizes 2026
Physiology or Medicine (optogenetics), Physics (the IceCube neutrino observatory), Chemistry (asymmetric synthesis) and Economic Sciences (macroeconomic stabilisation). - Book Review: The Body: A Guide for Occupants
Bill Bryson’s tour of the human body and the history of medicine. Reviewed by Aashna Raghu Sankar. - Student Showcase: DIY Experiment and Places to Visit
Build a Cartesian diver to explore pressure, buoyancy and density, and a visit to the Gujarat Science City, Ahmedabad. - Fun Zone: Previously This Month and Connections
November in science history, and a Connections puzzle conceptualised by Aashvi Kanodia.
Watch the Conversation
Prof. R. Lakshmi Narayan, Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at IIT Delhi, speaks with the student editors about metallic glasses, 3D printing with recycled steel, why aircraft and turbines fail from fatigue, how research culture differs across India, Germany, the US and China, and why AI is a useful tool but not a substitute for domain expertise. His advice to students: “Your impact in life will be decided by what you can do and how many lives you can affect.”
From the Featured Article
Do you realise the only reason you can read this is because you learned your ABCs? But did it ever occur to you that we never actually needed to learn them in that specific order? Nothing about the English language demands that Y follow X, or that D come after C. “A B C D” is simply a sequence humans decided to agree upon. Now imagine throwing all 26 letters into a box, shaking it and pulling them out at random. The chances of getting the alphabet in its exact order are about 1 in 400 septillion (approximately 4 followed by 26 zeros). Yet, those same 26 letters can be rearranged into every word from Shakespeare’s sonnets to the slang of Gen Z. In a way, it is the chaos of letters that makes language possible. Order is just one possibility. Disorder has vastly more ways to exist.
Now look beyond language. Your earphones inevitably tangle, food goes stale, heat bleeds into the cold and a squirt of perfume escapes into the air. These everyday events seem unrelated, yet they share a remarkable connection. In each case, a change occurs that is overwhelmingly more likely than its reverse. This brings us to entropy. It’s the invisible toll every physical process in the universe pays. It’s the reason why no engine can ever be 100% efficient, why living things must constantly fight to stay organised and why time only ever marches forward. But why does entropy matter?
The full article follows entropy from Sadi Carnot’s steam engines and Rudolf Clausius’s Second Law of Thermodynamics to Ludwig Boltzmann’s statistical definition, explains how living organisms stay ordered by feeding on negative entropy, why the arrow of time points one way, how Claude Shannon connected entropy to information, and why physicists now see entropy as a measure of what the observer does not know.
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Behind the Magazine
STEM Chronicles is produced by STEMonsters students, where high schoolers work on research, writing, and portfolio projects guided by a PhD scientist. Explore our after-school STEM programs for grades 3 to 12 or our programs for schools.