Quotes About Entropy

Those swirls in the cream mixing into the coffee? That's us. Ephemeral patterns of complexity, riding a wave of increasing entropy from simple beginnings to a simple end. We should enjoy the ride.

If everything in the universe evolves toward increasing disorder, it must have started out in an exquisitely ordered arrangement. This whole chain of logic, purporting to explain why you can't turn an omelet into an egg, apparently rests on a deep assumption about the very beginning of the universe. It was in a state of very low entropy, very high order. Why did our part of the universe pass though a period of such low entropy?

the interaction of gravity with other forces seems to be able to create order while still making the entropy go up—temporarily, anyway. That is a deep clue to something important about how the universe works; sadly, we aren't yet sure what that clue is telling us.

The punch line is that our notion of free will, the ability to change the future by making choices in a way that is not available to us as far as the past is concerned, is only possible because the past has a low entropy and the future has a high entropy. The

We might be able to guarantee that events along a closed timelike curve are consistent with the microscopic laws of physics, but in general they cannot be compatible with an uninterrupted increase of entropy along the curve.

Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?

Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased—thus do we refute entropy. Stated another way: Just as there are Laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.

Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos.

The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.

Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?

Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.

The last chapter discussed why we see time go forward: why disorder increases and why we remember the past but not the future.

the entropy of an isolated system always increases, and that when two systems are joined together, the entropy of the combined system is greater than the sum of the entropies of the individual systems.

Segunda ley de la termodinámica]. Según esta ley, el desorden o la entropía aumenta siempre con el tiempo. En otras palabras, se trata de una forma de la ley de Murphy: las cosas van a peor.

Die wachsende Fähigkeit der Menschheit, das Universum zu verstehen, hat einen kleinen Winkel der Ordnung in einem zunehmend der Unordnung verfallenden Universum geschaffen.

We can define life as an ordered system that can keep itself going against the tendency to disorder and can reproduce itself.

This says that in any closed system disorder, or entropy, always increases with time. In other words, it is a form of Murphy's law: things always tend to go wrong!

There are at least three different arrows of time. First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Then, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future. Finally, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting.

Our subjective sense of the direction of time, the psychological arrow of time, is therefore determined within our brain by the thermodynamic arrow of time. Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can't have a safer bet than that!

It is a matter of common experience that things get more disordered and chaotic with time.

Le désordre augmente avec le temps parce que nous mesurons le temps dans la direction où le désordre augmente. Qui dit mieux ?

All that shit starts in E.

The problem with using gunk as the starting material for generating organized life is that the random thermodynamic forces that were available in the primordial earth—the billiard-ball-like molecular motions that we discussed in chapter 2—tend to destroy order rather than create it.

Disintegration of structure equals information loss.