Quotes About Entropy

We ought to teach kids more about the Big Bang and entropy and particles. Every high school graduate should know that everything in the universe is made of a handful of particles. That's not a hard thing to know. But that's not what's emphasized.

One can define conservatism as the political form of melancholy. Fluctuating between equanimity and disgust, the conservative watches the activities of those moved by progressive feelings and waits for entropy to do its work.

Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they'd first thought to wonder at the heavens.

Nothing's immortal on a road trip of a billion years. The universe runs down in stop-motion around you, your backups' backups' backups need backups. Not even the error-correcting replication strategies cadged from biology can keep the mutations at bay forever. It was true for us meatsicles cycling through mayfly moments every thousand years; it was just as true for the hardware.

entropy increases'? Everything falls apart eventually.

Chaos doesn't do, it undoes.

A lot of author events are basically hour-long classes in entropy perched on bad seating under bright, hard lights, with - if you're lucky - bad Chardonnay and cheese on a stick waiting for you at the end of the ride.

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

Somehow, after all, as the universe ebbs toward its final equilibrium in the featureless heat bath of maximum entropy, it manages to create interesting structures.

It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.

I hope there isn't,' [a final answer] said Colin. "I'm for uncertainty. As soon as you think you know, you're done for. You don't listen and you can't hear. If you're certain of anything, you shut the door on the possibility of revelation, of discovery. You can think. You can believe. But you can't, you mustn't, 'know'. There's the real Entropy.

En cualquier caso, permítame indicarle que se olvida usted del principio entrópico: no hay destino prefijado, sino un mono aporreando las teclas de una máquina de escribir.

If we knew exactly what animal life was like before the fall into sin and knew what nature was like before the law of entropy invaded it, we would already be living in heaven.

Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.

Harmonising your biological rhythms with the rhythms of nature minimises entropy and reverses aging.

Humanity enveloped in entropy desperately seeking symmetry for peace of mind

Cut lose your ties with expectation. Your dreams are charlatans, your memories, stalemating quarks. Listen only to the pull of your atoms and follow the discordant hum of your personal entropy.

The algebraic sum of all the transformations occurring in a cyclical process can only be positive, or, as an extreme case, equal to nothing. Statement of the second law of thermodynamics, 1862

Things fall apart, it's scientific.

Paradoxically, the flows of energy that sustain complex things (including you and me) are helping entropy with its bleak task of slowly breaking down all forms of order and structure.

All things tend toward entropy. The whole universe is moving outward, the stars pulling away from one another, God knows what falling through the cracks between them.

The use of thermodynamics in biology has a long history rich in confusion.

Once I got home, I sulked for a while. All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy!

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.