Quotes About Entropy

By our actions we increase entropy of the Universe. By our entropy, we seek salvation from the coming dark.

Mundus senescit, ? ?????? ??????.

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

Erwin Schrödinger, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, summed up the basis of life: "What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy" (negative entropy or negentropy = free energy).

Heat thus occupies a unique position in the hierarchy of energies: all other forms of energy can be completely converted to it, but its conversion into other forms can never be complete, as only a portion of the initial input ends up in the new form.

The second law of thermodynamics, the universal tendency toward heat death and disorder, became perhaps the grandest of all cosmic generalizations – yet also one of which most non-scientists remain ignorant.

Finally, the third law of thermodynamics, initially formulated in 1906 as Walther Nernst's (1864–1941) heat theorem, states that all processes come to a stop (and entropy shows no change) only when the temperature nears absolute zero (–273°C).

God sighed, for all physical processes are reversible in theory—but not in practice.

Chaos is a creator of information—another apparent paradox.

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon , of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same.

So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy.

Here was one coin with two sides. Here was order, with randomness emerging, and then one step further away was randomness with its own underlying order.

Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. —David L. Watson

The second law, then, is the tendency of the universe to flow from less likely (orderly) to more likely (disorderly) macrostates.

Thinking generates entropy.")

Information is closely associated with uncertainty." Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information.

Entropy—already a difficult and poorly understood concept—is a measure of disorder in thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy.

First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases.

1. You can't win; 2. You can't break even either." But this is the cosmic, fateful one. The universe is running down. It is a degenerative one-way street. The final state of maximum entropy is our destiny.

In the far, far future, essentially all matter will have returned to energy. But because of the enormous expansion of space, this energy will be spread so thinly that it will hardly ever convert back to even the lightest particles of matter. Instead, a faint mist of light will fall for eternity through an ever colder and quieter cosmos.

Chaos was the natural law of the universe. Indifference was the engine of entropy. Man's apathy was the fertile ground in which the dark spirits tended their seeds.

Information is information, not matter or energy.

This control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback, and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors—that is, of elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.