Why we are drawn to abandoned places: Here's why it may be more than the architecture

As a physicist, I have often wondered whether our attraction to ruins stems from the fact that they allow us to see one of the most fundamental processes in the universe: the passage of time itself. PICS/ISTOCK

Just a question: Why do most of us love abandoned places?

Maybe at one point of time you have planned to go to visit abandoned forts, palaces, forgotten temples and deserted towns or you have already travelled there. Those places look like frozen or dusted or covered by nature or algal covering etc.

Yet there is something curious about this. Most visitors would not be nearly as interested if these places were fully restored. A newly constructed building may impress us, but a ruin often moves us.

Why is it so? The answer may have less to do with history or architecture than with something else. I'm very much interested in these places and last week I went to all these places on the Internet and I was trying to get the best recommendation to go.

As a physicist, I have often wondered whether our attraction to ruins stems from the fact that they allow us to see one of the most fundamental processes in the universe: the passage of time itself.

Time is strangely elusive. We live within it, measure it and constantly speak about it, yet we never directly observe it. We see clocks ticking and calendars changing, but time itself remains invisible. We infer its existence through change. A child grows older. A tree becomes taller. Metal get rusts. Our buildings get old, mountains erode.

Ruins belong to this category of visible change. Every crack in a wall, every collapsed arch and every weathered stone records the cumulative effect of countless days, seasons and years. In a sense, a ruin is a physical archive of time. Most objects around us conceal the passage of time. Ruins reveal it. This idea becomes even more interesting when viewed through the lens of physics.

One of the concepts in Chemistry and Physics is entropy. The term is often described as a measure of disorder. As I've worked on entropy for years, i see it way more than just a measure of disorder. Entropy is linked to the number of ways a system can be arranged. Over time, systems naturally evolve from less probable states toward more probable ones. This tendency gives rise to what physicists call the arrow of time.

Consider a glass sitting on a table. It can fall and shatter into hundreds of pieces. We have all seen this happen. Yet nobody has ever witnessed fragments spontaneously assembling themselves into a perfect glass and leaping back onto the table. A sandcastle can be destroyed by waves. The waves do not return later to rebuild it.

These examples all point in the same direction. The universe appears to possess a preferred temporal orientation. Events happen from states of lower entropy toward states of higher entropy. This asymmetry is so fundamental that it shapes our entire experience of reality.

We remember yesterday but not tomorrow. We grow older rather than younger. The future remains uncertain while the past is fixed. Ruins are among the clearest everyday manifestations of this principle. They are visible evidence of the arrow of time.

Yet this raises a question. If ruins are expressions of decay, why do we find them beautiful? After all, human beings spend enormous amounts of effort resisting deterioration. We repair houses, preserve monuments and maintain infrastructure. We generally regard decay as something to be prevented.

And yet we travel great distances to admire the results of it. Part of the answer may lie in how the human brain processes information. Neuroscientists increasingly describe the brain as a prediction machine. At every moment, it generates expectations about the world and compares them against reality. Much of perception involves resolving differences between what we expect and what we encounter.

Ruins create precisely this kind of cognitive tension. Our brains are naturally drawn to such puzzles. We try to reconstruct the absent pieces. Who lived here? What happened? Why was this place abandoned? What did it once look like? A functioning building tells us almost everything. A ruin tells us just enough to spark curiosity.

In this sense, ruins are unfinished stories. They invite participation. The observer becomes a co-author, filling gaps left by history and time. There is another reason why ruins may feel uniquely compelling. They occupy a rare position between order and disorder. Complete order can be surprisingly uninteresting. A perfectly uniform concrete wall conveys little information. Complete disorder, on the other hand, often appears meaningless. A random pile of rubble rarely captures our imagination.

Ruins exist in between. Complexity scientists have long observed that many interesting systems exist at the boundary between order and chaos. Ecosystems, economies and even biological organisms often derive their richness from occupying this intermediate state. Perhaps that is why they seem alive despite being abandoned.

There is also a lesson hidden within them. The processes affecting a ruined fortress are not fundamentally separate from those affecting the larger universe. They differ in size or surface area, not in principle. The principle remains the same in each case. Seen from this perspective, ruins become more than historical curiosities. They become windows into the logic of nature.

Perhaps this is why standing in a ruined structure often feels different from standing in a new one. We are not merely observing architecture. We are observing time made visible. Abstract ideas that usually exist only in equations and theories suddenly acquire physical form. Entropy becomes real. The arrow of time becomes real. Change becomes real.

Perhaps that is the real reason we love ruins. Not because they allow us to escape time, but because they allow us to see it.

Before I End: If you happen to visit a ruin this summer vacation, don't rush through it. Sit there for a while. Look at the walls, the cracks, the faded colours and the trees finding their way through stone. It is easy to see these places as reminders of what has been lost. But I came away with a different feeling. Ruins are not just about the past. They are among the few places where we can actually see time at work.

And once you notice that, an abandoned building never looks the same again.

Nishant Sahdev is a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States. He makes sense of the AI era in your favourite Sunday Mid-day.