“A contemporary variation on the apocalyptic vision is provided by the metaphor of entropy. Like apocalypse, entropy is an eschatological vision; it is based on the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the gradual leveling of energy in the universe and the molecular equilibrium called heat death at the end of the process. Entropy posits a world moving toward its extinction inexorably and irreversibly; the end is not to be orchestrated with the great crescendo of apocalyptic cataclysm but rather with the decrescendo of entropic chaos. This eschatology is far more pessimistic than conventional apocalyptic eschatology. The end is not caused by man’s action and God’s reaction, but is produced by decomposition, disintegration, and gradual loss of energy and differentiation. The anthropomorphism of the traditional apocalypse, with it implicit sense of purposeful history responding to human as well as to divine actions, yields to the bleak mechanism of a purely physical world that is irreversibly running out of energy. Whereas the apocalyptic vision sees a causal relationship between past, present, and future, the law of entropy, when applied to human affairs, negates such rational, temporal continuity. History does have a direction as it moves towards heat death, but it admits not human influence, no logical relationship between cause and effect. The use of the metaphor of entropy to describe the end of times appears through the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and James Purdy.”