Quotes about Entropy

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. Votes: 6

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them. Votes: 6

Only entropy comes easy. Votes: 4

Question: Who governs the governors? Answer: Entropy Votes: 4

Entropy and optimism: the twin forces that make the world go around. Votes: 4

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought. Votes: 4

Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable. Votes: 4

If you stop being scared, that's when entropy sets in, and you may as well go home. Votes: 4

Entropy makes things fall, but life ingeniously rigs the game so that when they do they often fall into place. Votes: 4

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases. Votes: 4

We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography. Votes: 4

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy. Votes: 4

If we knew exactly what animal life was like before the fall into sin and knew what nature was like before the law of entropy invaded it, we would already be living in heaven. Votes: 4

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies. Votes: 4

Entropy requires no maintenance. Votes: 3

Entropy increases. Things fall apart. Votes: 3

Entropy is the price of structure. Votes: 3

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2) Votes: 3

Once I got home, I sulked for a while. All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy! Votes: 3

Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information. Votes: 3

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. Votes: 3

I'm a human entropy producer. Votes: 2

The organism feeds on negative entropy. Votes: 2

The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. Votes: 2

It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe. Votes: 2

I think I have this field around me that makes electronics work bad. It's not like an entropy thing; it happens very quickly. Votes: 2

In an expanding universe, order is not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 2

Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish. Votes: 2

You know, entropy is associated thermodynamically, in systems involving heat, with disorder. And in an analogous way, information is associated with disorder, which seems paradoxical. But when you think about it, a bit of information is a surprise. If you already knew what the message contained, there would be no new information in it. Votes: 2

Consciousness, when it's unburdened by the body, is something that's ecstatic; we use the mind to watch the mind, and that's the meta-nature of our consciousness; we know that we know that we know, and that's such a delicious feeling, but when it's unburdened by biology and entropy, it becomes more than delicious: it becomes magical. Votes: 2

I'm trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it's interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It's all because of entropy increasing. Votes: 2

The fact that you can remember yesterday but not tomorrow is because of entropy. The fact that you're always born young and then you grow older, and not the other way around like Benjamin Button - it's all because of entropy. So I think that entropy is underappreciated as something that has a crucial role in how we go through life. Votes: 2

An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy. Votes: 2

[My] pictures are about memory and forgetfulness. The evidence is dissolving. Bones crumble; human ash returns to soil; teeth, sandals, hair, bullets, axes disperse into atoms and molecules. Footprints in the snow will be erased by the next storm. The evidence of evil, like the evidence of good, obeys the universal laws of entropy. Heat cools, matter disintegrates, memories fade. If we let them. Votes: 2

In the complex course of its evolution, life exhibits a remarkable contrast to the tendency expressed in the Second Law to Thermodynamics. Where the Second Law expressed an irreversible progression toward increased entropy and disorder, life evolves continually higher levels of order. The still more remarkable fact is that this evolutionary drive to greater and greater order also is irreversible. Evolution does not go backward. Votes: 2

Jacob's room is the place entropy goes to die. Votes: 0

Millions for nonsense, but not one cent for entropy. Votes: 0

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy. Votes: 0

Humanity enveloped in entropy desperately seeking symmetry for peace of mind Votes: 0

The immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible. Votes: 0

Harmonising your biological rhythms with the rhythms of nature minimises entropy and reverses aging. Votes: 0

The total energy of the universe is constant; the total entropy is continually increasing. Votes: 0

So far as physics is concerned, time's arrow is a property of entropy alone. Votes: 0

The universe is based on sullen entropy; It falls apart as it goes on Votes: 0

Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy. Votes: 0

There are foods that accelerate aging and entropy, and others that renew and revitalise the body. Votes: 0

Instead of focusing on the work, you focus on the entropy and the chaos and you get a byproduct. Votes: 0

The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time. Votes: 0

Death, decay, entropy, and destruction are the true suspensions of God's laws; miracles are the early glimpses of restoration." Votes: 0

The story of the Kelly system is a story of secrets - or if you prefer, a story of entropy. Votes: 0

The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium. Votes: 0

The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy. Votes: 0

You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state. Votes: 0

Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is. Votes: 0

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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 Votes: 0

We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create, from a physicists viewpoint, entropy. Votes: 0

One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one's just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.... 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. Votes: 0