Top 100 Quotes About Entropy
#1. Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information.
Hans Christian Von Baeyer
#2. So far as physics is concerned, time's arrow is a property of entropy alone.
Arthur Eddington
#3. In a physical system, information is the opposite of entropy, as it involves uncommon and highly correlated configurations that are difficult to arrive at.
Cesar Hidalgo
#4. The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.
Rex Stout
#5. 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.
Jerry Saltz
#6. In high school, when I first heard of entropy, I was attracted to it immediately. They said that in nature all systems are breaking down, and I thought, What a wonderful thing; perhaps I can make some small contribution to this process, myself.
George Carlin
#7. 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.
Sean Carroll
#8. Entropy is Janus-faced. Its upside surprises are redemptive and favorable to freedom. It is freedom of choice. But the carrier itself requires constant vigilance against entropic noise. Order is not spontaneous, but it is a necessary condition for all the surprises of freedom and opportunity.
George Gilder
#9. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.
James Gleick
#10. The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible.
James Howard Kunstler
#11. Whether you have a leadership title or not, you have the potential to either lead your organization beyond all expectations or inhibit its growth through entropy.
Simon T. Bailey
#12. Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.
Hakim Bey
#13. This is a grave danger: the stoppage of information between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that such stoppage is the way of entropy, of universal destruction.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#14. Programming is a Dark Art, and it always will be. The programmer is fighting against the two most destructive forces in the universe: entropy and human stupidity. These are not things you can overcome with a "methodology" or on a schedule.
Damian Conway
#15. Entropy and optimism: The twin forces that make the world go around.
Neil Gaiman
#16. Shiva's reluctance to marry is a consistent theme in Shaiva lore. In effect he opposes the birth of the cosmos, preferring the blissful state in which matter is in a state of entropy and the spirit is free of form. Not surprisingly, he is called the god of destruction.
Devdutt Pattanaik
#17. The fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat.
1. The energy of the universe is constant.
2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.
Rudolf Clausius
#18. 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!
Stephen Hawking
#19. A lot of author events are basically hour-long classes in entropy perched on bad seating under bright, hard lights, with - if you're lucky - bad Chardonnay and cheese on a stick waiting for you at the end of the ride.
Nick Harkaway
#20. Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#21. The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.
James Gleick
#22. The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects.
John C. Wright
#23. This universe and all it is connected with will come to an end. Entropy carries us towards the inevitable omega point, that is why entropy exists.
Peter F. Hamilton
#24. Von Neumann told Shannon to call his measure entropy, since no one knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.
Jeremy Campbell
#25. The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy.
William Poundstone
#26. You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.
Brian Greene
#27. But secrets never, ever disappear, even after they are revealed. And that's the real secret right there. The empty space that never gets filled. The entropy of falsehood. The real secret is the secret itself.
Michael Lavigne
#29. The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#30. It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase.
Isaac Asimov
#31. It was not easy for a person brought up in the ways of classical thermodynamics to come around to the idea that gain of entropy eventually is nothing more nor less than loss of information.
Gilbert N. Lewis
#32. entropy is always lurking on the borders of information-rich anomalies,
Cesar Hidalgo
#33. Millions for nonsense, but not one cent for entropy.
Alfred Bester
#34. You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.
Terence McKenna
#35. The revelation we've come to is that we can trust our memories of a past with lower, not higher, entropy only if the big bang - the process, event, or happening that brought the universe into existence - started off the universe in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.
Brian Greene
#36. Once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We're back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy.
Douglas Rushkoff
#37. 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.
Sean Carroll
#38. like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy.
Arthur C. Clarke
#39. Harmonising your biological rhythms with the rhythms of nature minimises entropy and reverses aging.
Deepak Chopra
#40. For godhood and the hope for mankind, and within each of us is the original sin of laziness, the ever-present force of entropy pushing us back to childhood, to the womb and to the swamps from which we have evolved.
M. Scott Peck
#41. Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.
Spider Robinson
#42. The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must by law decay.
Anthony Doerr
#45. Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
#46. The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don't let them banalize you. Keep fighting.
Brian Christian
#47. Life, this anti-entropy, ceaselessly reloaded with energy, is a climbing force, toward order amidst chaos, toward light, among the darkness of the indefinite, toward the mystic dream of Love, between the fire which devours itself and the silence of the Cold.
Albert Claude
#48. As someone fairly committed to the death of our solar system and ultimately the entropy of the universe, I think the question of what we should worry about is irrelevant in the end.
Bruce Hood
#49. If we envision that, somehow, the surface area of a black hole is a measure of the entropy it contains, then the increase in total surface area could be read as an increase in total entropy.
Brian Greene
#50. The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.
Robert Smithson
#51. I think I have this field around me that makes electronics work bad. It's not like an entropy thing; it happens very quickly.
Cary Fukunaga
#52. The powerful notion of entropy, which comes from a very special branch of physics ... is certainly useful in the study of communication and quite helpful when applied in the theory of language.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#53. I remember New York in the '80s as a place with vacant lots that would eventually give over to nature. Weeds would grow up, squirrels would move in. That entropy is gone now. It's too expensive to let a vacant lot go natural.
Moby
#54. 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.
Dan Brown
#55. Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of 'fairy' is imported as a delicate spice.
Graham Joyce
#56. For once, entropy was on my side.
Anonymous
#58. I think that there's something extremely beautiful about the Olympic ideal and its motto - 'Swifter, higher, stronger' - it's such a beautiful motto, and it celebrates everything which is the antithesis of death and dissolution and entropy.
Chris Cleave
#59. We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography.
Michael Polanyi
#60. My original intent was to write a horror story about someone who loses his mind and slowly begins to unravel. The story, as I envisioned it, would evoke horror within the context of psychological decay, entropy.
Jupiter Cutter
#61. The sinful nature of man is the same in every generation. Man naturally moves towards entropy. We are driven towards the carnal, mundane and the mediocre. We need a higher power, force and truth to deliver us from this entropic movement to self-destruction and pull us higher to greater values.
Sunday Adelaja
#63. So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy.
James Gleick
#64. The body and mind are one. When the intimate relationship between mind and body is disrupted, aging and entropy accelerate. Restoring mind/body integration brings about renewal. Through conscious breathing and movement techniques, you can renew the body/mind and reverse the aging process.
Deepak Chopra
#65. This must be the sixth realm, the nameless void. Entropy is the only lord here. We will all bow down before him in the end.
Peter F. Hamilton
#66. Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. - David L. Watson
James Gleick
#67. Once I got home, I sulked for a while. All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy!
Andy Weir
#68. The universe is based on sullen entropy;
It falls apart as it goes on
Robyn Hitchcock
#69. All things tend toward entropy. The whole universe is moving outward, the stars pulling away from one another, God knows what falling through the cracks between them.
Cassandra Clare
#70. Suck it, Entropy. We have an appointment, my old friend, but not today.
Colson Whitehead
#71. Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.
William Poundstone
#72. 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.
Stephen Hawking
#73. The love of fate corresponds to a willingness to accept ownership of one's actions, whether these are spontaneous or imposed from the outside. It is this acceptance that leads to personal growth, and provides the feeling of serene enjoyment which removes the burden of entropy from everyday life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#74. Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.
("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#75. Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.
Rudolf Arnheim
#76. Entropy
The Disintegrating Integration of
Cheez-Whiz Squirts Insipid Inspiration
Quoth the Oblong Eclipse of
Nether-Knowledge Never Knowing
Decaying Matter in a Decaying Orbit
Orangutans of Science
Study Ignorance of What
The Cows Already Know.
Ubiquitous Bubba
#77. Technology is the means by which we have decommissioned natural selection and are seizing control. We are no longer to be victims of some blind evolutionary process where sentient beings are massacred by entropy.
Jason Silva
#78. This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won't just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.
Jenny Offill
#79. From Adam Smith's pin factory to Moore's Law of microchips, the division of labor drives the extension of the market, not the other way around. Supply creates its own demand through the proliferation of goods and services down the curves of learning, entropy, and imagination.
George Gilder
#80. [A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.
Erwin Schrodinger
#81. QUESTION: Who governs the governors?
ANSWER: Entropy.
Frank Herbert
#82. I'd begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.
Mark O'Connell
#83. Humanity enveloped in entropy desperately seeking symmetry for peace of mind
Dean Cavanagh
#84. My Japanese designed, vacuum-sealed thermos was one of my most prized possessions. I had filled it up before I went to sleep so there were no worries. This baby laughed in the face of entropy.
B. Justin Shier
#85. People are, at their heart, constantly moving toward a state of entropy. Much like this ship. We're all spiraling out of control.
Beth Revis
#86. In the face of entropy and nothingness, you kind of have to pretend it's not
there if you want to keep writing good code.
Karl Lehenbauer
#87. One of the main purpose of art has ever been that of making its indispensable contribution to the growth of entropy of the universal stupidity.
William C. Brown
#88. Cut lose your ties with expectation. Your dreams are charlatans, your memories, stalemating quarks. Listen only to the pull of your atoms and follow the discordant hum of your personal entropy.
Virginia Petrucci
#90. Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases.
Paul Kalanithi
#91. I did not want the universe's ever-growing entropy to interfere with my lovelife
David Levithan
#92. Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they'd first thought to wonder at the heavens.
Peter Watts
#93. The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.
Freeman Dyson
#94. Stars looking at our planet, watching entropy and pain and maybe startin' to wonder how the chaos in our lives could pass as sane. I've been thinkin' 'bout the meaning of resistance of a world beyond our own and suddenly the infinite and penitent began to look like home.
Jon Foreman
#95. Jacob's room is the place entropy goes to die.
Jodi Picoult
#96. The total energy of the universe is constant; the total entropy is continually increasing.
Rudolf Clausius
#97. Information ... exhausts itself in the staging of meaning ... [and leads] not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy
Jean Baudrillard
#98. For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon, of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same.
James Gleick
#99. Entropy increases. Things fall apart.
John Green
#100. Information is entropy. This was the strangest and most powerful notion of all.
James Gleick
