Quotes About Thermodynamics

Perhaps death represents the severing of the living organism's connection with the orderly quantum realm, leaving it powerless to resist the randomizing forces of thermodynamics.

Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero.

The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must by law decay.

The entropy of a closed system never decreases.

minus 340° Kelvin

Entropy is a term from physics that refers to the amount of disorder in a system.

Unfortunately, the laws of thermodynamics guarantee that the entropy in the universe tends toward a maximum.

One of Prigogine's greatest contributions has been to create a new thermodynamics to describe living systems.The organizing activity of living, selforganizing systems, finally, is cognition, or mental activity. This implies a radically new concept of mind, which was first proposed by Gregory Bateson. Mental process is defined as the organizing activity of life. This means that all interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive, or mental interactions.

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

If, as is the custom, I speak mainly about my own researches, I must say that I was fortunate in finding that not everything had yet been gleaned in the field of general thermodynamic radiation theory.

As soon as we step beyond the established boundaries of pure thermodynamic theory, we enter a trackless region confronting us with obstacles which even the most astute of us are almost at a loss to tackle.

Darwinism doesn't explain where gravity comes from. It doesn't explain where thermodynamics comes from. It doesn't explain where the laws of physics come from. It doesn't explain where matter came from.

It is just physics - who can argue with Newton and the first law of thermodynamics?

It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.

Heat cannot of itself pass from a colder to a hotter body.

The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.

Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.

These examples both demonstrate that the laws of physics, notably Newton's laws, are time-reversible. They work just as well backwards in time as forwards, and there is no place in them for the second law of thermodynamics. The fundamental laws of physics do not distinguish between past and future.

The theoretical understanding of what was going on was developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century using statistical mechanics –an approach to thermodynamics that is based on applying the laws of statistics to the behaviour of large numbers of particles, such as the huge number of atoms or molecules present in a box of gas, each of them acting in accordance with Newton's laws.

The natural effect of processes going on in the Universe is to move from a state of order to a state of disorder, unless there is an input of energy from outside

Much of the apparent uniformity of Nature is a uniformity of averages. Our gross senses only take cognizance of the average effect of vast numbers of individual particles and processes; and the regularity of the average might well be compatible with a great degree of lawlessness of the individual. I do not think it is possible to dismiss statistical laws (such as the second law of thermodynamics) as merely mathematical adaptations of the other classes of law to certain practical problems.

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

The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.

This is a fundamentally insane notion, which developed in my own mind from an idea of Buckminster Fuller's. Every so often I try to encourage other writers by telling them this cheerful set of thoughts; always they gaze at me absolutely appalled. Fuller's assertion was roughly to this affect: the purpose of people on earth is to counteract the tide of entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics.