Ginsberg's theorem is an epigrammatic paraphrase and parody "theorem" which restates or analogizes the consequences of the four laws of thermodynamics of physics in terms of a person playing a game. It has various formulations, but it can be more or less expressed as:
The theorem is named after the poet Allen Ginsberg, though there does not appear to be any concrete evidence that Ginsberg himself coined the theorem. The phrase is sometimes stated as a general adage without specific reference to the laws of thermodynamics.
History A comprehensive history and etymology of the epigrammatic phrase can also be found from the etymologist Barry Popik. The phrase is often attributed to the British scientist C. P. Snow, who apparently was credited by his students for using it to help learn the laws of thermodynamics in the 1950s. However this claim appears to be without a source. A semblance of the phrase appears to have been first printed in a 1953 issue of the science fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction, whose editor, John Wood Campbell Jr., referenced acoustic engineer and professor Dwight Wayne Batteau of Harvard University:
In a 1956 issue of the same magazine, Batteau himself expanded it further in what appears to have been the first complete mention of the epigrammatic phrase in print:
It was later presented in the literary magazine The Kenyon Review in a 1960 short story titled "Entropy" from widely-regarded novelist Thomas Pynchon, who was still then an engineering physics undergraduate at Cornell University:
Physicist William R. Corliss also partly wrote about the phrase in a 1964 educational booklet freely distributed by the United States Atomic Energy Commission to disseminate knowledge about atomic energy to the American public:
Science writer Isaac Asimov stated at least the first two laws in a 1970 article, and was being credited with the paraphrased version by the end of the decade. The phrase then appeared in a non-scientific setting in the opening lines of the popular song "You Can't Win" originally written by songwriter Charlie Smalls for the stage musical The Wiz:
The song was written by Smalls in 1974 and performed during the 1974 Baltimore run of the musical. The song later reached number 81 on the Billboard Hot 100. Though the song was formally released in 1979 as part of a musical soundtrack album, it was originally written and copyrighted by Smalls in 1974. Remarkably, Allen Ginsberg appears to have only ever written about the laws of thermodynamics once, in his 1973 poem "Yes and It's Hopeless", though not in any connection to the original epigrammatic phrase:
Thus Ginsberg was seemingly, at the very least, cognizant of the laws of thermodynamics by the time of 1973. It is claimed that Ginsberg supposedly mentioned the epigrammatic phrase as a fun fact during a poetry session in or around 1974. In 1975, someone — possibly either Ginsberg's gay partner and poet Peter Orlovsky, poetry associate William Burroughs, or Philip Whalen — compiled a collection of quirky laws, including a "Ginsberg's Theorem" based on Ginsberg's prior musings. In 1975, Ginsberg's theorem formally appeared by name, with no association to thermodynamics, in a listing of parody-like proverb laws by Conrad Schneiker in the counterculture magazine The CoEvolution Quarterly:
It may be possible that this appearance originated from a slight misstatement of the lines in the earlier 1974 song by Charlie Smalls. Writer Arthur Bloch, in his popular 1977 book "Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong!" which popularized Murphy's law, conflated the Ginsberg's theorem with the science of thermodynamics:
Notably, the book's acknowledgements mention Conrad Schneiker, who had written about Ginsberg's theorem in The CoEvolution Quarterly just two years prior in 1975. The theorem may have also been relayed to Bloch in conversation with his acquaintance Harris Freeman, who he knew from University of California, Santa Cruz, and who had found a collection of "laws", including Murphy's Law, Ginsberg's Theorem, and many others, somewhere on the ARPANET (a precursor of the Internet) in the mid 1970s while working as a systems administrator for ILLIAC IV (the world's first massively parallel computer) at the NASA Ames Research Center near Mountain View, California. With the publication of Bloch's book, Ginsberg's theorem seemingly thereafter became much more widely known.
References
External links Quotations related to Thermodynamics at Wikiquote
