You dropped your phone. You're rotating it in the light, hunting for damage. There it is. A hairline scratch across the display.

Three weeks. You kept it pristine for three weeks.

Here's the thing: it was always going to happen. Not because you're clumsy, but because the universe has one hobby, and that hobby is wrecking stuff.

Your screen is already dying

That OLED display works by making each pixel glow on its own. No backlight. Gorgeous. Also, slowly killing itself.

Blue subpixels go fastest. Manufacturers juice up the blue and use software tricks to hide the decay, but they're fighting chemistry. The industry measures screen life in "half-life"—time until brightness drops 50%. Modern OLEDs get about 100,000 hours. Do the math on your daily use and that number shrinks.

Burn-in happens when static images leave ghosts behind. Your screen remembers every navigation bar, every app icon. It develops memory. The bad kind.

You'll probably crack it or upgrade before organic decay matters much. Capitalism's planned obsolescence saves you from the slow death.

LEDs aren't forever either. "Lifespan" means "dims gradually until you blame your eyes." Heat does it. Phosphor coatings darken. The semiconductor junction breaks down molecule by molecule. That cheap enclosed lamp you bought? Racing toward darkness.

Glass weathers too. Seems permanent—Romans made glass, medieval cathedrals still have their windows, Egyptian glass beads sit in museums. But atmospheric moisture leaches ions from the surface over centuries. Ancient glass looks iridescent because it's decomposing. Your phone's aluminosilicate glass is engineered for toughness, but chemistry doesn't care about engineering. Given enough time, it hazes and crumbles like everything else.

Centuries feel like a long time. They're not. We'll get there.

Steel wants to go home

Steel is iron forced into an arrangement it hates. Refining ore fights thermodynamics. The instant steel meets oxygen and water, it starts crawling back toward iron oxide.

We call this rusting.

"Stainless" is marketing. Chromium forms a protective layer, sure, but stainless steel corrodes too, especially near salt water. Your car is rusting. The rebar inside concrete highways is rusting, expanding, cracking structures from within. Every bridge gets inspected and repainted because entropy wins given enough time. The question isn't will it fail but when.

Concrete has its own problems. Roman concrete lasted two thousand years. Modern Portland cement starts crumbling after fifty. Water gets in, carries salts, rusts the rebar, expands, cracks everything open. Infrastructure built mid-century is hitting end-of-life now, all at once, everywhere.

Mountains fall too, just slower. Water seeps into cracks, freezes, expands, splits rock apart. This is called frost wedging, and it's shockingly effective. Plant roots do the same thing. Lichens secrete acids. Rain dissolves limestone grain by grain.

The Appalachians were Himalaya-tall four hundred million years ago. Erosion rounded them into gentle ridges. The Himalayas are only fifty million years old, which is why they're still jagged and sharp. Give them time. Everest grows about four millimeters yearly as India shoves into Asia. Erosion removes about the same amount. Temporary equilibrium. In tens of millions of years, no Everest.

Stars burn out

The sun fuses 600 million tons of hydrogen every second. Middle-aged star, 4.6 billion years in, about five billion left. Then it swells into a red giant, probably swallows Earth, sheds its outer layers, collapses into a white dwarf the size of Earth with the mass of a star. The white dwarf cools over trillions of years into a black dwarf—cold, dark, dead.

No black dwarfs exist yet. Universe isn't old enough.

Protons might not last either. Grand Unified Theories predict they decay with a half-life around 10³⁴ years. Nobody's observed it yet, but that just sets a lower limit. If protons go, everything made of atoms has an expiration date. Not soon—10³⁴ years makes the current age of the universe look like a rounding error—but eventually no more stuff. Just radiation and particles drifting apart.

Black holes evaporate too. Hawking figured it out in 1974. Quantum effects at the event horizon bleed energy away. Right now black holes absorb more than they radiate, but the universe keeps cooling. Eventually they'll shrink. A sun-mass black hole takes 10⁶⁷ years. Supermassive ones at galaxy centers might last 10¹⁰⁰ years.

Then they're gone. Final gamma-ray flashes, then nothing but thin particle soup spreading forever.

Heat death. Maximum entropy. No temperature differences, no chemical reactions, no events. Time becomes meaningless because nothing changes. Not frozen—undefined.

Why anything?

If entropy always increases, and the universe is 13.8 billion years old, why isn't everything dead already? Why stars? Why you?

Nobody knows.

The "Past Hypothesis" says the universe started in a low-entropy state. That's description, not explanation. Why that state? What caused it?

Penrose proposed Conformal Cyclic Cosmology: when everything expands and cools until only photons remain, scale loses meaning. An infinite cold empty universe is mathematically identical to an infinitely hot dense one. Cycle restarts. Black holes swallow entropy on the way out.

Others say we're a random fluctuation in eternal equilibrium. This leads to problems—you're statistically more likely to be a disembodied brain hallucinating a universe than an actual person in an actual cosmos. Most physicists hate this conclusion.

Multiverse advocates say every possible universe exists, and we're here because we couldn't be anywhere else. Tautology dressed as explanation.

Entanglement: a different decay

Here's something newer. In 2024, physicists proposed the Entanglement Past Hypothesis. Maybe the universe didn't just start thermodynamically ordered. Maybe quantum states were initially separate, unentangled, independent. And they've been tangling up ever since.

Quantum entanglement means particles become correlated in ways classical physics can't handle. Measure one, instantly know something about the other, no matter the distance. Einstein hated it. Experiments confirmed it anyway.

When quantum systems interact with their surroundings, they become entangled with them. A photon bounces off your coffee cup, and now the cup's quantum state is smeared across billions of air molecules and thermal fluctuations. This is decoherence. It's why quantum weirdness stays microscopic. Everything constantly entangles with everything else, destroying coherence.

Maybe this is the real arrow of time. Not heat spreading but quantum systems becoming increasingly correlated. The universe started as separate independent states. Now everything connects through chains of interactions stretching back billions of years.

You're not just falling apart. You're merging with everything at the quantum level. The boundary between you and the rest of the cosmos is a temporary fiction.

Heat death, in this view, means maximum entanglement. Every quantum degree of freedom correlated with every other. Nothing independent anymore. The concept of "separate things" dissolves.

That scratch on your screen? Photons, air molecules, your fingertip, the glass—all became quantumly correlated at that spot. You married your phone to the causal future of the universe.

Time might be entropy

What if time doesn't exist separately from entropy? What if they're the same thing?

How do you know time passes? Things change. Ice melts, coffee cools, memories form. All entropy increasing. Without entropy gradients, no way to distinguish before from after. The past is lower entropy. The future is higher. Maybe that's not a correlation. Maybe that's the definition.

Fundamental physics equations work equally well forward and backward. No built-in arrow. Drop a ball, the math describes it falling. Run the equations in reverse, the math describes it leaping up. Doesn't happen, but the equations don't care. You never see eggs unscramble or coffee spontaneously heat up, but the laws of physics technically allow it.

The arrow comes from boundary conditions. Universe started low-entropy, has been increasing since. Time flows from past to future because entropy flows from low to high. If entropy ever ran backward, you'd remember the future and anticipate the past. Causality would flip.

At heat death, when entropy maxes out and nothing changes, does time exist? No events, no gradients, no way to mark one moment from another. Maybe the universe doesn't end. Maybe it stops happening. Not frozen in time—time itself becoming undefined, like dividing by zero.

The gap

We don't know why the universe started low-entropy. We don't know why anything exists rather than nothing. We don't know why physical constants have values that permit stars and chemistry and life. Tweak the gravitational constant slightly and stars never form. Adjust the strong nuclear force and atoms fall apart.

Some of these questions might be unanswerable in principle, not just in practice.

Throughout history, the name for inexplicable foundations has been "God."

Lightning was Zeus. Life's origin was divine breath. Disease was punishment or possession. Science advances, gaps shrink, but they never vanish completely. They move deeper.

Now they sit at the bottom of reality itself. Why a universe? Why these laws? Why that improbable initial state?

Physics describes what happens. It has less to say about why there's anything to happen to.

Is that God? Is the inexplicable boundary condition—the thing that makes everything else possible—divine? Is the low-entropy beginning a creation event in the truest sense?

Or is "God" just what we call the mystery when we're tired of admitting ignorance? A name for the gap, not an explanation of it?

Nobody knows. Physicists don't. Philosophers don't. Theologians claim to but disagree with each other violently, which suggests they don't know either.

Maybe future physics explains initial conditions from deeper principles we haven't found yet. Maybe cyclical cosmology dissolves the question by eliminating beginnings entirely. Maybe multiverse frameworks make "why this universe?" incoherent as a question.

Or maybe something genuinely inexplicable sits at the bottom. Brute fact. Uncaused cause. The question that eats its own tail.

Some call it God. Some call it the universe. Some refuse to name it at all.

Whatever you call it: something produced a low-entropy state 13.8 billion years ago. That state has been degrading since. You are part of that degradation. So is your phone. So is everything you've ever touched or thought about or loved.

The scratch

That scratch is entropy doing its job. Small, local, insignificant increase in disorder. Your screen was briefly more ordered than its environment wanted. Now slightly less.

More scratches will join it. The display will dim. Battery will weaken. Eventually you replace it, and the old one gets recycled or landfilled, its components slowly returning to simpler chemical states.

This is fine. This is how reality works.

You exist in a narrow window of cosmic time. After the universe cooled enough for atoms and stars and planets, long before heat death erases all structure. Your phone exists in an even narrower window—after we figured out how to make it, before it falls apart.

Everything you love is temporary. Every monument slowly erodes. Pyramids wear down. Voyager will fall silent and drift as dead metal forever. The sun dies. Stars go out. Black holes evaporate.

And somehow, this is freeing.

Nothing is precious because it lasts. Things are precious because they exist now, temporarily, improbably, against the grain of a universe that prefers disorder. Your scratched phone is organized matter. You are organized matter. That anything exists at all is the mystery—not that it ends.

The scratch doesn't matter because the phone doesn't matter. Not cosmically. But also, the scratch doesn't matter because everything matters equally—all of it temporary, all of it improbable, all of it worth noticing while it's here.

Put down the phone. Stop examining the damage. Go outside. Look up.

Everything ends. That's what makes it real.

Tomorrow the sun rises, slightly lighter than today. You won't notice.