  The axion is a motivated cold dark matter candidate, which it would be
interesting to distinguish from weakly interacting massive particles. Sikivie
has suggested that axions could behave differently during non-linear galaxy
evolution, if they form a Bose-Einstein condensate, and argues that
``gravitational thermalisation'' drives them to a Bose-Einstein condensate
during the radiation dominated era. Using classical equations of motion during
linear structure formation, we explore whether the gravitational interactions
of axions can generate entropy. At linear order in Newton's constant, we
interpret that the principle activities of gravity are to expand the Universe
and grow density fluctuations. To quantify the rate of entropy creation we use
the anisotropic stress to estimate a short dissipation scale for axions, which
does not confirm previous estimates of their gravitational thermalisation rate.
