Entropy, Measurement, and the McLito

I’ve always found energy to be one of the most fascinating ideas in science.

When I studied aircraft engineering, thermodynamics was one of those subjects that initially felt like a collection of equations and laws. Heat transfer, pressure, entropy, efficiency, conservation of energy. At first it was something to learn for an exam. Over time, though, it became something much more interesting. It became a lens through which to look at the world.

Entropy in particular always stayed with me.

There’s something strangely humbling about the idea that the universe naturally trends toward disorder, and yet from that disorder emerges stars, planets, life, and eventually consciousness itself. Sometimes when I look up at the night sky, I find myself thinking less about the stars and more about the processes behind them. Vast exchanges of energy taking place over incomprehensible scales of time. Fusion, gravity, radiation. A constant transformation from one state into another.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that so much of our understanding of reality comes down to measurement.

We measure mass in grams. Energy in joules. Pressure in pascals. Distance in metres. Time in seconds.

Entire fields of science are built around assigning a unit to something and then agreeing what that unit means.

What’s particularly amusing is that many of these units are named after people. Pascal. Newton. Joule. Watt. Names that became attached to ideas because someone helped us understand a little more about the universe.

Which occasionally leads me to a ridiculous thought. What if one day we develop a way to measure thinking itself?

Not intelligence. Not knowledge. Not memory.

Thinking.

The actual process of transforming information into understanding.

How much “work” does it take to solve a problem? To form an idea? To generate a new insight? To reason through uncertainty?

Perhaps future generations will have some unit for it.

A standard measure for cognitive effort.

A way of quantifying thought itself.

For the sake of a joke, I sometimes imagine it being called the McLito.

“That theorem took approximately 4.3 McLitos to solve.”

“The average person generates 2,000 McLitos before lunch.”

It’s obviously nonsense, but it’s also an interesting thought experiment.

After all, many of the units we use every day must have sounded equally strange before they existed.

Perhaps that’s one of the most exciting things about science and technology. Every so often humanity discovers that something we assumed was impossible to measure can, in fact, be measured.

And when that happens, our understanding of reality changes with it.

Maybe thinking itself will remain one of those mysteries forever.

Or perhaps one day, somewhere in the future, someone will find a way to quantify it.

And if by some miracle they decide to call it the McLito, I certainly won’t complain.