Quotes About Entropy

Everything that lives, it seems, must play host to the germ of its own dissolution.

Die Musik wird aus dem Rauschen geboren: das erste menschliche Lallen, die erste Information im Chaos. Aus seiner Quelle entsprungen, lässt dieser Strom der Arrangements und Kombinationen, der in Melodien und Harmonien zur Sprache hinabfließt, die Negentropie anwachsen.[...]

Likewise, even life on Earth seems to violate the second law, because it takes just nine months to convert hamburgers and french fries into a baby, which truly is a miracle.

Living in a mortal world involves pain.... Entropy presides here. Everything moves toward dissolution and death. But physical damage is the lesser problem. The damage to our hearts is far more difficult to repair. We experience loss, disappointments, failure, mistakes. People deliberately harm us. Other wounds are self-inflicted. with experience we learn that we cannot harm another without also harming ourselves. ~The Traveler

The revelation we've come to is that we can trust our memories of a past with lower, not higher, entropy only if the big bang - the process, event, or happening that brought the universe into existence - started off the universe in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.

Stephen Hawking showed mathematically that the entropy of a black hole equals the number of Planck-sized cells that it takes to cover its event horizon. It's as if each cell carries one bit, one basic unit of information.

Messy arrangements far outweigh orderly ones.

Dutifully following the second law, we conclude that today's state derives from yesterday's even lower entropy state. And that state, we envision, derives from the day-before-yesterday's still lower entropy state, and so on, yielding a trail of ever-decreasing entropy taking us ever farther back in time until we finally reach the big bang.

The entropy of a system is related to the number of indistinguishable rearrangements of its constituents, but properly speaking is not equal to the number itself. The relationship is expressed by a mathematical operation called a logarithm; don't be put off if this brings back bad memories of high school math class. In our coin example, it simply means that you pick out the exponent in the number of rearrangements-that is, the entropy is defined as 1,000 rather than 2^1000.

If we envision that, somehow, the surface area of a black hole is a measure of the entropy it contains, then the increase in total surface area could be read as an increase in total entropy.

But when we examine the universe, there seem to be numerous lost opportunities, since there are many things that are more ordered than they have to be.

by the time the universe was a couple of minutes old, it was filled with a nearly uniform hot gas composed of roughly 75 percent hydrogen, 23 percent helium, and small amounts of deuterium and lithium. The essential point is that this gas filling the universe had extraordinarily low entropy. The big bang started the universe off in a state of low entropy, and that state appears to be the source of the order we currently see. In other words, the current order is a cosmological relic.

Notice that the value of the entropy and the amount of hidden information are equal. That's no accident. The number of possible heads-tails rearrangements is the number of possible answers to the 1,000 questions-(yes,yes,no,no,yes,...) or (yes,no,yes,yes,no,...) or (no,yes,no,no,no,...), and so on-namely, 2^1000. With entropy defined as the logarithm of the number of such rearrangements-1,000 in this case-entropy is the number of yes-no questions any one such sequence answers.

For now, we will simply assume that one way or another, the early universe transitioned into this low-entropy, highly ordered configuration, sparking the bang and allowing us to declare that the rest is history.

Es ist ungeheuer viel wahrscheinlicher, dass alles, was wir jetzt im Universum erblicken, aus einer seltenen, aber gelegentlich zu erwartenden Abweichung der totalen Unordnung erwuchs, als dass es sich langsam aus dem noch unwahrscheinlicheren, unglaublich stärker geordneten, erstaunlich niederentropischen Ausgangspunkt entwickelte, den der Urknall voraussetzt.

life is one more means the universe employs to release the entropy potential locked within matter.

My intent here is to use that insight to grasp how a universe with ever-increasing entropy, destined for ever-greater disorder, creates a wealth of order along the way.

Entropy can decrease. It's just ridiculously unlikely.

If entropy has been steadily increasing since the big bang, then the entropy back at the bang must have been much lower than it is today.

But this … creature was none of those things. He was barely distinguishable from an animal. The young man—singlehandedly—seemed intent on increasing the universe's entropy by an order of magnitude.

el deterioro de sus cuerpos de que habla la segunda ley de la termodinámica

You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.

Entropy was a troubling and beautiful concept that lay at the heart of much human toil and sorrow. Everything, especially life, fell apart. Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.