Top 48 Quotes About Thermodynamics
#1. Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.
Norman Ralph Augustine
#2. It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.
Barry Commoner
#3. The law of thermodynamics, you know, the idea that nothing is lost, that a loss in one area equals a gain in the other, was actually not invented by scientists but by the people who write redemptive fiction. [...] Actually, in real life, we lose things all the time and they're gone. Lost, period.
Jane Hamilton
#4. Gear-shifting is thus a phenomenon of a higher logical type than giving gas, and it would be patently nonsensical to talk about the mechanics of complex gears in the language of the thermodynamics of fuel supply.
Paul Watzlawick
#5. Willard Gibbs did for statistical mechanics and for thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure.
Robert Andrews Millikan
#6. Classical thermodynamics ... is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced ... will never be overthrown.
Albert Einstein
#7. I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace and propelled by compressible flow.
Neil Armstrong
#8. One, two, three, four, we don't want your fuckin' laws of thermodynamics!
David Rakoff
#9. We define thermodynamics ... as the investigation of the dynamical and thermal properties of bodies, deduced entirely from the first and second law of thermodynamics, without speculation as to the molecular constitution.
James Clerk Maxwell
#10. I know just enough about thermodynamics to understand that if it takes too much fossil-fuel energy to create ethanol, that's a very stupid way to solve an energy problem.
Charlie Munger
#11. Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like "optics" or "thermodynamics" are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections.
Ted Chiang
#12. If it weren't happening, he would have sworn that their reproduction speed alone violated the laws of thermodynamics - or at least common decency. The
Evan Currie
#13. The difficult truth is that the basic law of thermodynamics still holds: When we eat more calories than we expend, we gain weight. When we burn more energy through physical activity or exercise than we take in from food and drinks, we lose weight.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#14. I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
Alan Lightman
#15. Cost is always an object - the second law of thermodynamics sees to that
Daniel Dennett
#16. The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.
James Clerk Maxwell
#17. The Second Law of Thermodynamics: If you think things are in a mess now, just wait!
Jim Warner
#18. Time sits at the center of the tangle of problems raised by the intersection of gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics.
Carlo Rovelli
#19. Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero.
David R. Ellis
#20. The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics.
Terry Pratchett
#21. Perhaps death represents the severing of the living organism's connection with the orderly quantum realm, leaving it powerless to resist the randomizing forces of thermodynamics.
Jim Al-Khalili
#22. Rudolf Clausius coined the word in 1865, in the course of creating a science of thermodynamics. He needed to name a certain quantity that he had discovered - a quantity related to energy, but not energy.
James Gleick
#23. Man's destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young.
E. O. Wilson
#25. According to Bastardi, human-induced climate change contradicts what we call the 1st law of thermodynamics. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. So to look for input of energy into the atmosphere, you have to come from a foreign source.
Joe Bastardi
#26. Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
Clay Shirky
#27. Sure enough, the water heated up. That's not really a surprise, but it's nice to see thermodynamics being well behaved.
Andy Weir
#28. 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
#29. It is just physics - who can argue with Newton and the first law of thermodynamics?
Mark Hyman
#30. The algebraic sum of all the transformations occurring in a cyclical process can only be positive, or, as an extreme case, equal to nothing.
[Statement of the second law of thermodynamics, 1862]
Rudolf Clausius
#31. That's what makes the creationist viewpoint not just staggeringly wrong, but sadly impoverished. In twisting around the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they take a powerful tool for understanding the world and try to make it into a barrier to understanding instead.
Bill Nye
#32. 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
#33. The conviction grows in me that we shall discover laws of personality and behavior which are as significant for human progress or human understanding as the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics.
Carl R. Rogers
#34. There is a law out there, if not of thermodynamics then of something equally primary and inescapable, that explains why everything from instant messaging to fabulous sex to aspic can in the end be defined as an illustration of the futility of existence. And it really, really sucks.
Julie Powell
#35. However inventive humans turn out to be, they will never invent their way around the laws of thermodynamics. That fundamental truth is denied by standard infinite-growth theory, which blithely projects productivity gains from technological innovation indefinitely into the future.
The Worldwatch Institute
#36. Regarding the Laws of Thermodynamics: (1) You can't win, (2) you can't break even, and (3) you can't get out of the game.
Dennis Overbye
#37. Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes, and the second law of thermodynamics.
Seth Lloyd
#38. The use of thermodynamics in biology has a long history rich in confusion ...
Harold Morowitz
#39. To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation.
Derrick Jensen
#40. Nothing is lost, Sassenach; only changed." "That's the first law of thermodynamics," I said, wiping my nose. "No," he said. "That's faith.
Diana Gabaldon
#41. You can't talk to thermodynamics and you can't pray to probability theory. You
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#42. Evolutionism, as taught by Darwinism, has nothing - nothing - to say about how life originated. Has nothing to say about how the governing principles in the universe - gravity, thermodynamics, motion, fluid motion - how any of those originated. It's ... it's got some gigantic missing pieces.
Ben Stein
#43. Thermodynamics, correctly interpreted, does not just allow Darwinian evolution; it favors it.
Ludwig Boltzmann
#44. Once I got home, I sulked for a while. All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy!
Andy Weir
#45. Darwinism doesn't explain where gravity comes from. It doesn't explain where thermodynamics comes from. It doesn't explain where the laws of physics come from. It doesn't explain where matter came from.
Ben Stein
#46. 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
#48. The point to keep in mind is that you don't lose fat because you cut calories; you lose fat because you cut out the foods that make you fat-the carbohydrates.
Gary Taubes
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