Quotes About Entropy

You were born out of death - and will collapse back into its entropic embrace. The future is yet to be born, the past is ashes - and the present expires even as we cradle it to our wanting breast.

I suppose," says Jeremy, "what I don't like is that the moment you fix something, it starts to break down again, that an engine works against itself. By its very act of running, it weakens itself, tries to come undone. Everything is slowly worked loose by the vibrations of the moving engine." Just like us, thinks Harriet.

Life is death in slow motion.

Heat is the energy of random chaotic motion, and entropy is the amount of hidden microscopic information.

Information: the negative reciprocal value of probability.

The universe always moves from an ordered state to a disordered one; that a glass may fall to the ground and shatter yet you never see a broken glass reassemble itself and then jump back on the table.

Instead of focusing on the work, you focus on the entropy and the chaos and you get a byproduct.

Black holes, we all know, are these regions where if an object falls in, it can't get out, but the puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is, what happens to the information that an object contains when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

Living thing, does Entropy, my wicked Aunt, notice our joint conspiracy? Not yet, I think, for you are yet too small. Your puny struggle against her tide is mere fluttering in a great wind. And she thinks I am still her ally.

Entropy is the loyal servant of the second law of thermodynamics. So, if we think of entropy as a character in our story, we should imagine it as dissolute, lurking, careless of others' pain and suffering, not interested in looking you in the eye. Entropy is also very, very dangerous, and in the end it will get us all.

Entropy is the rule in organizations, as it is in the physical universe. Over time, all organized systems evolve toward chaos. Unless you pursue change relentlessly, your efforts will eventually wither away.

Entropy is only ever tamed by the counteracting investment of active energy to bring some order and structure to your week.

There are two ways to look at life. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don't realize it.

Only in the last 200 years have we become dependent on nonrenewable minerals. Modern industry runs on the scarcest of the available forms of low entropy. Traditional technology (windmills, waterwheels, etc.) runs on the more abundant solar source. How ironic, therefore, to be told by technological optimists that modern technology is freeing man from dependence on resources (Barnett and Morse, 1963, p. 11). The very opposite is true.

Chaos is a vortex that spins faster with each thing it swallows.

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.

Glansdorff, P., & Prigogine, I. (1971). Thermodynamic theory of structure, stability and fluctuations. London: Wiley.

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

No one can win against kipple, he said, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

Eventually he forgot what event had started off his decline into entropy; God mercifully occludes us to the past as well as the future.

No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

In a way, he realized, I'm part of the form-destroying process of entropy.

I did not want the universe's ever-growing entropy to interfere with my lovelife