Third Thermodynamics Quotes

#1. The use of thermodynamics in biology has a long history rich in confusion ...

Harold Morowitz

#2. 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

#3. 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

#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. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

Dan Castellaneta

#9. 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

#10. Once I got home, I sulked for a while. All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy!

Andy Weir

#11. Thermodynamics, correctly interpreted, does not just allow Darwinian evolution; it favors it.

Ludwig Boltzmann

#12. 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

#13. You can't talk to thermodynamics and you can't pray to probability theory. You

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes, and the second law of thermodynamics.

Seth Lloyd

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Pierre Dos Utt

#26. It is just physics - who can argue with Newton and the first law of thermodynamics?

Mark Hyman

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Sure enough, the water heated up. That's not really a surprise, but it's nice to see thermodynamics being well behaved.

Andy Weir

#30. 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