Quotes About Entropy

Clausius summarized his application of entropy to thermodynamics in two dramatic phrases that had a big impact at the time. They were (1) First Law: The energy of the universe is constant, and (2) Second Law: The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.

Whenever he was reminded that life was a losing battle to entropy, what with light-bulbs flickering and horseshoes and nails shuffling out of neat order the moment he turned his back, he was also reminded that humor and a cheerful disposition were the only known antidotes.

We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography.

So either closed timelike curves can't exist, or big macroscopic things can't travel on truly closed paths through spacetime—or everything we think we know about thermodynamics is wrong.

But along the way, that energy becomes increasingly useless. It turns into heat and noise,

But while only a tiny fraction of the mass of the universe appears to be in black holes, they contain a huge amount of entropy. A single supermassive black hole, a million times the mass of the Sun, has an entropy according to the Bekenstein-Hawking formula of 1090. That's a hundred times larger than all of the nongravitational entropy in all the matter and radiation in the observable universe.242

Information is physical.

To understand why the Second Law works in our real world, it is not sufficient to simply apply statistical reasoning to the underlying laws of physics; we must also assume that the observable universe began in a state of very low entropy

Descubrimos que no somos los protagonistas principales de la vida en el cosmos, sino un minúsculo epifenómeno, que hemos florecido durante un breve instante sobre la ola del aumento de entropía que va del big bang al silencioso vacío que le espera al futuro universo.

Everything that comes together falls apart.

Things come apart much easier than they go together.

Our greatest enemies are ultimately not our political adversaries but entropy, evolution (in the form of pestilence and the flaws in human nature), and most of all ignorance—a shortfall of knowledge of how best to solve our problems.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.

the nature of progress that we know and they didn't. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.

Energy channeled by knowledge is the elixir with which we stave off entropy, and advances in energy capture are advances in human destiny.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can to avoid becoming our food. As Adam Smith pointed out, what needs to be explained is wealth. Yet even today, when few people believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators, discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.

If you extol reason, then what matters is the integrity of the thoughts, not the personalities of the thinkers. And if you're committed to progress, you can't very well claim to have it all figured out. It takes nothing away from the Enlightenment thinkers to identify some critical ideas about the human condition and the nature of progress that we know and they didn't. Those ideas, I suggest, are entropy, evolution, and information.

harming the other are massively outweighed by the disadvantages we would suffer in being harmed (yet another implication of the Law of Entropy: harms are easier to inflict and have larger effects than benefits).

The sequence of bases in a DNA molecule correlates with the sequence of amino acids in the proteins that make up the organism's body, and they got that sequence by structuring the organism's ancestors—reducing their entropy—into the improbable configurations that allowed them to capture energy and grow and reproduce.

When energy is poured into a system, and the system dissipates that energy in its slide toward entropy, it can become poised in an orderly, indeed beautiful, configuration—a sphere, spiral, starburst, whirlpool, ripple, crystal, or fractal.

El romántico movimiento verde no ve la captación humana de energía como una forma de resistir la entropía y promover la prosperidad humana, sino como un crimen atroz contra la naturaleza, que conducirá a una guerra de recursos, aire y agua contaminados y que comportará un cambio climático que acabará con la civilización.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind.

LIVING MATTER EVADES THE DECAY TO EQUILIBRIUM

A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of 'maximum entropy'. Practically, a state of this kind is usually reached very rapidly. Theoretically, it is very often not yet an absolute equilibrium, not yet the true maximum of entropy. But then the final approach to equilibrium is very slow. It could take anything between hours, years, centuries,