Humpty Dumpty Nursery Rhyme Research

Humpty Dumpty

noun

informal

noun: humpty-dumpty; plural noun: humpty-dumpties; noun: Humpty Dumpty; plural noun: Humpty Dumpties

1. 1.

   a short fat person.
2. 2.

   a person or thing that once overthrown cannot be restored.

   "regimes toppled like so many humpty-dumpties"

Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle and one of the best known in the English-speaking world. Though not explicitly described, he is typically portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg. The first recorded versions of the rhyme date from late eighteenth century England and the tune from 1870 in James William Elliott's National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs. Its origins are obscure and several theories have been advanced to suggest original meanings.

In science Humpty Dumpty has been used to demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics. The law describes a process known as entropy, a measure of the number of specific ways in which a system may be arranged, often taken to be a measure of "disorder". The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder. After his fall, and subsequent shattering, the inability to put him together again is representative of this principle, as it would be highly unlikely, though not impossible, to return him to his earlier state of lower entropy, as the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty#cite_note-Entropy-41