Quotes About Entropy

as efficient as communications' mechanisms become, they are still, as they have always been, subject to the overwhelming tendency for entropy to increase, for information to leak in transit, unless certain external agents are introduced to control it. I have already referred to an interesting view of language made by a cybernetically-minded philologist—that speech is a joint game by the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion.

We have already seen that certain organisms, such as man, tend for a time to maintain and often even to increase the level of their organization, as a local enclave in the general stream of increasing entropy, of increasing chaos and de-differentiation. Life is an island here and now in a dying world.

S—The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Second Law states, among other things, that the universe is running out of usable energy.

The Second Law is also known as the Law of Entropy

which is a fancy way of saying that nature tends to bring things to disorder.

Thermodynamics is the study of matter and energy

Everything has gone wayward. Sliding sideways into entropy.

Nothing's perfect... because time passes... and the beetle and the worm find their way into everything sooner or later.

As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. Life is a journey, not a destination. Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination.

All things by nature are ready to get worse

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum

I was especially fascinated by the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that entropy virtually always increases in a closed system. Entropy is a measure of disorder or uselessness. In lay terms, this means that progress stalls or declines when something is walled off from the outside world. Usually

But information is physical.

Truly random data remains spread out in an undefined mess. But chaos-deterministic and patterned-pulls the data into visible shapes. Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

orderly disorder created by simple processes. Truly random data remains spread out in an undefined mess. But chaos—deterministic and patterned—pulls the data into visible shapes. Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. —David L. Watson (1930)

Above all, in a universe ruled by entropy, drawing inexorably toward greater and greater disorder, how does order arise?

Shannon used a phrase he had never used before: "information theory.

Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy:

Information is entropy. This was the strangest and most powerful notion of all.

The demon replaces chance with purpose. It uses information to reduce entropy.

Information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder.

The birth of information theory came with its ruthless sacrifice of meaning—the very quality that gives information its value and its purpose.