- A few years ago,
my husband excitedly told me
about this video I just had to see
about a magnetic engine that was 100% efficient.
I immediately replied that the video was fake
because you can't win, you can't break even,
and you can't get out of the game.
He was understandably confused.
And I told him that was shorthand
for the laws of thermodynamics.
He said, "Oh, like The Wiz?"
Now it was my turn to be confused.
See, I'd seen the 1978 musical many years before,
but I'd totally forgotten about the scarecrow song.
I looked it up and yep, there it is.
♪ You can't win, child ♪
♪ You can't break even ♪
♪ You can't get out of the game ♪
(jazzy music)
- I started to wonder
why is a scarecrow singing about the laws of thermodynamics?
Ready to learn the story?
Let's go.
♪ Electricity, electricity ♪
- It all started in the 1940s and 50s when there was
an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Harvard
named Dr. Wayne Batteau.
Dr. Batteau was an avid fan of science fiction
and started a speculative society of science fiction lovers,
which was as he put it, quote,
"the marketplace of half-baked ideas."
Anyway, the editor of a science fiction magazine
called "Astounding Science Fiction"
would occasionally join them and then fill some space
with some of Batteau's clever math and physics jokes.
In 1956 he quoted Batteau as saying
"The three laws of thermodynamics,
"translated from mathematics into English, come out
"you can't win, you can't even break even,
"furthermore, you can't get out of the game."
Batteau's joke by the way
was that information theory was the opposite,
i.e. you can win, you can support a friend,
and you can quit the game when you're ahead.
I don't really get the info dynamics joke.
Maybe you do, please explain it to me.
But I do get why the three laws of thermodynamics
can be expressed this way.
The first law:
energy of an isolated system is conserved, i.e
♪ You can't win, child ♪
- The first law says that energy can be transformed
from one object to another or from one form to another.
Remember heat is a form of energy.
But the total energy remains the same.
So why is this law represented
by the expression "you can't win"?
Well, you can't win,
meaning you can't get more energy out of the system
than you put into it.
Law number two:
any real process increases the entropy of a system, i.e.--
♪ Can't break even ♪
- Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system
or its messiness.
Hot objects have more entropy than cold ones,
mix more than separate,
liquid more than solid.
You can easily reduce the entropy of a single object.
But in the process
you must increase the entropy of other objects
so that the sum total change in entropy
is greater than zero.
You can't break even because an engine involves a process
and therefore increases the messiness of the system,
and therefore needs extra energy to keep it going.
Therefore, you can never have an engine
that is 100% efficient, sorry hubby,
and you can never have a perpetual motion machine.
Law number three:
no object can reach absolute zero temperature, i.e.
♪ Can't get out of the game ♪
(jazzy music)
We can make objects very close to absolute zero
but we can never reach it.
Which means that molecules are always moving around
a little bit,
which means even on a molecular scale
you can't get out of the game.
Batteau's cute expressions
seem to have been largely forgotten for many years,
and it didn't pop up in print again 'til 1975
when a friend of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg
wrote a collection of quirky laws,
including what he called Ginsberg Theorem which was
"You can't win, you can't break even,
"you can't even quit the game."
It seems likely that Ginsberg read Batteau's joke,
dropped thermodynamics part,
and just made it into
a depressing Murphy's law type expression
that he liked to give.
After that physicists started to use Ginsberg Theorem
to teach the laws of thermodynamics,
not knowing that Ginsberg didn't come up with it.
Now we finally get to "The Wiz".
In 1970, a man named Ken Harper
approached 27 year old composer named Charlie Smalls
about writing the music to brand a new musical.
Now Charlie Smalls was a good choice.
He was a musical prodigy
who'd been given concerts since the age of five
and had joined Julliard when he was 11 years old,
and he'd written hundreds of songs by this time.
He recalled that when he was a kid, quote,
"All the neighborhood kids were auditioning
"for West Side Story,
"And I remember saying to myself,
"Charlie, you don't want to play in that.
"You want to write it"
Harper, however, was an odd choice
to be a producer of a Broadway hit.
He was a former soap opera actor
and who had just quit his job
as a program director of a radio station
to make his dream a reality,
telling investors, quote,
"We're gonna do a new version of The Wizard of Oz
"with a contemporary score and an all black cast.
"It will be fun and it will be spectacular."
Harper was very persuasive and Smalls ended up agreeing
to write almost all of the songs to "The Wiz",
although it took him three years to do so.
I don't know how Smalls heard the expression
"you can't win, you can't break even,
"and you can't get out of the game".
He could have read it
in the original science fiction magazine
as he used almost the exact same wording
as Batteau used 18 years earlier.
Or he could have heard it from Alan Ginsberg
or even somewhere else.
Either way Smalls was inspired,
and in 1974 wrote "You Can't Win"
for the wicked witches servants to sing.
He wrote a completely different song
for the scarecrow to sing.
They opened "The Wiz,"
the super soul musical "Wonderful Wizard of Oz"
in October of 1974.
They then spent months revising it, hiring a brand new cast,
a brand new director
who decided to drop the "You Can't Win" song
as it seemed to take away from the wicked witches song
"Don't Nobody Give Me No Bad News".
Anyway, at first they had very bad attendance
and a lot of really critical reviews
from possibly racist reviewers.
And they were about to be shut down
when they had the radical idea of advertising on TV.
- [Announcer] "The Wiz"
live on stage at the Broadway Theater.
It's a dream come true.
- Suddenly they were a hit
and with popularity came better reviews.
By the end of the year they had won seven Tonys
and seemed perfectly poised to make money on the big screen.
In 1976 Motown Records bought the film rights
and the next year
Diana Ross insisted on playing the lead role,
which propelled the film into big budget land.
The screenwriter, the director, and the main actress
were also big fans of a group therapy movement called EST
and rewrote the entire script to be,
according to the producer,
an Estian fable full of EST buzzwords
about knowing who you are and sharing and all that.
He added, quote, "I hated the script a lot."
The music director of the film,
renowned producer Quincy Jones whose middle name is Delight,
which I find delightful,
made far less changes in the music.
However, upon meeting the 19 year old Michael Jackson
who was hired to play the scarecrow,
he decided that the original scarecrow song was too gospely
and revived "You Can't Win" and put it its stead.
This song became so iconic
that many recent stage versions of "The Wiz"
put "You Can't Win" as the scarecrow's song.
♪ You can't win ♪
♪ You can't break even ♪
♪ Can't get out of the game ♪
- Now I love the 1978 musical "The Wiz".
However, it is, as Lindsay Ellis would say, a hot mess.
So if you have the chance to see it in live version
then you get to support local artists,
the music is fabulous,
and maybe you'll have help with your physics homework.
And remember if someone shows you a machine
with free energy or 100% efficiency
or something that can go to absolute zero,
you just tell them
♪ You can't win child ♪
♪ You can't break even ♪
♪ Get out, ooh yeah ♪
♪ Ooh ♪
♪ Get out ♪
♪ Whew ♪
♪ Of the game ♪
- And you don't have to sing that well to tell them that.
Anyway, if you want to know more about the three laws
and where they came from I have your back.
I've already made a video about the third law
and how it was created by a chemist
trying to make fertilizer and how it ended up
making Einstein and his quantum theories famous.
I'm now working on a video on the first two laws,
which is a story of an amazing 1700s female scientist
dropping lead weights,
a shy and troubled French engineer who liked trains,
and a kind German who had the same stern look and beard
in absolutely every picture or drawing ever taken of him/
And that is next time on "The Lightning Tamers."
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Okay, have a good day.
(jazzy music)