Entropy Quotes - Page 2

• Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Science, Elements, May

  Rudolf Arnheim (1974). “Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order”, p.21, Univ of California Press

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• Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Science, Hands, Probability Theory

  Rudolf Arnheim (1974). “Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order”, p.19, Univ of California Press

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• If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

  Arthur Eddington

  Law, Giving, Found

  Arthur Eddington (2012). “The Nature of the Physical World: Gifford Lectures (1927)”, p.74, Cambridge University Press

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• I think we defy entropy and impermanence with our films and our poems. We hold onto each other a little harder and say, 'I will not let go. I do not accept the ephemeral nature of this moment. I'm going to extend it...forever. Or at least I'm going to try.'

  Jason Silva

  Letting Go, Thinking, Forever

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• The universe is based on sullen entropy;
  It falls apart as it goes on

  Robyn Hitchcock

  Fall, Goes On, Sullen

  Song: The Devil's Coachman

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• Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

  Norbert Wiener

  Organization, Giving, Example

  Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.21, Da Capo Press

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• What's important is how we use our time on this earth, not how conspicuously we give our money away. What's important is the energy and courage we are willing to expend reversing entropy, battling cynicism, suffering and challenging mediocre minds, staring down those who would trample our dreams, taking a stand for magic, and advancing the potential of the human race.

  Dan Pallotta

  Dream, Race, Giving

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• Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

  John Green

  Fall, Cells, Together

  John Green (2008). “Looking for Alaska”, p.181, Penguin

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• I'm a human entropy producer.

  Dean Kamen

  Producers, Humans

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• It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

  Robert Silverberg

  Color, Years, Vision

  Robert Silverberg (2009). “Dying Inside”, p.116, Macmillan

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• In the complex course of its evolution, life exhibits a remarkable contrast to the tendency expressed in the Second Law to Thermodynamics. Where the Second Law expressed an irreversible progression toward increased entropy and disorder, life evolves continually higher levels of order. The still more remarkable fact is that this evolutionary drive to greater and greater order also is irreversible. Evolution does not go backward.

  J. H. Rush

  Law, Order, Levels

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• Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.

  Brian Christian

  Needs, Inquiry, Want

  "The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive". Book by Brian Christian, March 1, 2011.

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• My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it 'information,' but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it 'uncertainty.' When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, 'You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.'

  Claude Shannon

  Names, Ideas, Two

  "Scientific American", Vol. 225, (p. 180), 1971.

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• Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.

  William Poundstone

  Use, Debate, Shannon

  William Poundstone (2010). “Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street”, p.57, Macmillan

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• We all have those times in relationships, whether it's work or personal or family or whatever it is, where there's something that's eating at you and eating at you, and you want to say it to the person that you care about the most, but you're so afraid it's going to destroy everything. Like the fear of destruction keeps one from saying what they want to say - when, in actuality, by not saying it, things get worse. Because it's the entropy, the leak that doesn't get fixed.

  Bob Mould

  Want, Care, Eating

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I find the big bang, really quite fascinating. I mean, here you have all these highfalutin scientists and they're saying it was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order. Now these are the same scientists that go around touting the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, which says that things move toward a state of disorganization.

  Benjamin Carson

  Moving, Mean, Order

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• This is a grave danger: the stoppage of information between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that such stoppage is the way of entropy, of universal destruction.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Communication, Information, Way

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• As someone fairly committed to the death of our solar system and ultimately the entropy of the universe, I think the question of what we should worry about is irrelevant in the end.

  Bruce Hood

  Thinking, Worry, Ends

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• So far as physics is concerned, time's arrow is a property of entropy alone.

  Arthur Eddington

  Arrows, Physics, Thrive

  Arthur Eddington (2012). “The Nature of the Physical World: Gifford Lectures (1927)”, p.80, Cambridge University Press

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• The fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat.
  1. The energy of the universe is constant.
  2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.

  Rudolf Clausius

  Science, Law, Two

  Rudolf Clausius (1867). “The Mechanical Theory of Heat: With Its Applications to the Steam-engine and to the Physical Properties of Bodies”, p.365

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• The story of the universe finally comes to an end. For the first time in its life, the universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy finally stops increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disordered. Nothing happens, and it keeps not happening, forever. It's what's known as the heat-death of the universe. An era when the cosmos will remain vast and cold and desolate for the rest of time the arrow of time has simply ceased to exist. It's an inescapable fact of the universe written into the fundamental laws of physics, the entire cosmos will die.

  Brian Cox

  Law, Arrows, Forever

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• You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.

  Terence McKenna

  Cutting, Years, Stupidity

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• Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.

  Hakim Bey

  Clouds, Order, Desire

  Hakim Bey (2003). “T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism”, p.3, Autonomedia

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• [A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.

  Erwin Schrodinger

  Science, Environmental, Negative

  Erwin Schrodinger (2012). “What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches”, p.73, Cambridge University Press

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• Entropy is Janus-faced. Its upside surprises are redemptive and favorable to freedom. It is freedom of choice. But the carrier itself requires constant vigilance against entropic noise. Order is not spontaneous, but it is a necessary condition for all the surprises of freedom and opportunity.

  George Gilder

  Opportunity, Order, Choices

  George Gilder (2013). “Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World”, p.84, Regnery Publishing

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