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Entropy Quotes

Browse 159 quotes about Entropy.

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Entropy Quotes

“If adding two numbers produced a random result each time, we could never rely on math. Fortunately there are definite answers with no variation. Similarly, there is nothing random about the study of science. If each iteration of an experiment yielded a different result from the same variables, we would not be able to conclude anything with certainty. The scientific method is not compatible with randomness. If the universe were truly random, the study of science itself would not be possible. The laws of nature stand in direct opposition to the notion that all is born of chance.”

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Book:Believable: Discover the God That Saves All
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“...all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since once could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible…”

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Book:The Melancholy of Resistance
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“I had evidently disturbed the bird from its perch which, on closer inspection, turned out to be something called the Bentinck Fountain. It had clearly seen glories greater than the poor laurels tossed its way now. Once it had been cherished as an effecting feature of a grand estate. Now it stood apologetically by the side of the road, its empty trough sticking out like a beggar's imploring hand.”

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Book:At Night: A Journey Round Britain from Dusk Till Dawn
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“Matter (Becoming) is entropic. Pure mind (Being) has zero entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is said to predict the Heat Death of the universe. In fact, this is false. What it actually predicts is the death of matter, space and time – via the expansion of the physical universe until it flatlines and thus ceases to be. Evolution is about eliminating matter, and this is accomplished – exactly – at the end of the universe, in readiness for the creation of the next universe. Only at the end of the universe is Becoming not operating in conjunction with Being. However, as soon as Being reaches exclusivity (Becoming has ceased to exist), the first act of Being is to initiate Becoming again, and this is none other than the Big Bang, the cosmic eruption of Becoming across all monadic nodes, and the origin of the “splitting”of all monadic minds into separate centers of agency.”

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Book:Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason
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“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.”

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Book:To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
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“If everything in the universe evolves toward increasing disorder, it must have started out in an exquisitely ordered arrangement. This whole chain of logic, purporting to explain why you can't turn an omelet into an egg, apparently rests on a deep assumption about the very beginning of the universe. It was in a state of very low entropy, very high order. Why did our part of the universe pass though a period of such low entropy?”

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Book:From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
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“You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arrival of time known as the heat death, when all stars have died, all black holes have evaporated away and the entirety of creation is a uniform bath of photons incapable of storing a single bit of information about the glorious adolescence of our wonderful Universe.”

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Book:Forces of Nature
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“It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviolate on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or underwater; I pictured it as infinite—a labyrinth not of octagonal pavillions and paths that turn back upon themselves, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms....I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.”

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Book:El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan
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“What I have said about the newspapers and the movies applies equally to the radio, to television, and even to bookselling. Thus we are in an age where the enormous per capita bulk of communication is met by an ever-thinning stream of total bulk of communication. More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value. This is fundamentally an external handicap of modern communication, but it is paralleled by another which gnaws from within. This is the cancer of creative narrowness and feebleness. In the old days, the young man who wished to enter the creative arts might either have plunged in directly or prepared himself by a general schooling, perhaps irrelevant to the specific tasks he finally undertook, but which was at least a searching discipline of his abilities and taste. Now the channels of apprenticeship are largely silted up. Our elementary and secondary schools are more interested in formal classroom discipline than in the intellectual discipline of learning something thoroughly, and a great deal of the serious preparation for a scientific or a literary course is relegated to some sort of graduate school or other.”

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Book:The human use of human beings: cybernetics and society
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“He asked: “You are aware of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, right?” “‘You Do Not Talk About Thermodynamics?’” Rudy said nothing. “The currency of the universe, Entropy. Okay and…?” “A candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.” “That seems unrelated, but I’ll allow it. Is that supposed to be comforting?” “I like either the lavender or cinnamon-scented ones.” “This isn’t the advice I was asking for and you know that.” “Isn’t it? You know, it doesn’t take a master’s in behavioral psychology to see you’ve some unresolved issues.” “And the universe has a tendency to devolve into chaos, so why bother controlling it, just control myself?” Rudy just continued to shoot glances at Danny’s arm. Danny kept it face down, pretending not to notice. “Rudy: Sigmund Freud meets Dr. Seuss. Thank you.”

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Book:Dysfunction
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“The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organisation, and maximise chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organise chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. "It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe," James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses. The laws of nature still mark the outer boundaries of permissibility – but life, in all its idiosyncratic, mad weirdness, flourishes by reading between the lines. Even the elephant cannot violate the law of thermodynamics – although its trunk, surely, must rank as one of the most peculiar means of moving matter using energy.”

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Author:Siddhartha Mukhergee
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“Keeping things stable takes energy. I guess it's a little counter-intuitive, since you think of Newton's first law: a body at rest will stay at rest. But the reality is different. Think about an old water tank you find in the woods. It's sitting there, doing nothing, and yet it's slowly falling apart. Eventually the rust eats away at it beyond a certain threshold, and it collapses under its own weight.”

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Book:Entropy
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“The universe is driven by a very simple force – symmetry. The universe goes from perfect symmetry to broken symmetry and back to perfect symmetry again. It does this forever. We can put it in other terms: God becomes non-God (alienated from God) and then God again, following an immense, cosmic dialectical process through which he becomes conscious of who and what he is. We are all agents of God’s rediscovery. We are all becoming God.”

GodSymmetryEntropyDialecticsAsymmetryPanentheismPanlogosZero Entropy
Book:Free Will and Will to Power
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“Ontological mathematics is operating in such a way as to organize itself into a zero-entropy structure – mathematical perfection. The “Big Bang” is equivalent to the total scrambling of a cosmic Rubik’s Cube. The task of ontological mathematics is then to unscramble the Cube and return it to its original, pristine configuration. Emotionally, this amounts to returning to perfect Love and Bliss. Intellectually, it means reaching a state of perfect logic and reason … thinking perfectly”

PhilosophyPerfectionRationalismEntropyBig BangOntological MathematicsOmega PointRubik S CubeZero EntropyPanlogos Dialectic
Book:God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics
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“In despair, I offer your readers their choice of the following definitions of entropy. My authorities are such books and journals as I have by me at the moment. (a) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy of a system which cannot be converted into work by even a perfect heat engine.—Clausius. (b) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy which can be converted into work by a perfect engine.—Maxwell, following Tait. (c) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy which is not converted into work by our imperfect engines.—Swinburne. (d) Entropy (in a volume of gas) is that which remains constant when heat neither enters nor leaves the gas.—W. Robinson. (e) Entropy may be called the ‘thermal weight’, temperature being called the ‘thermal height.’—Ibid. (f) Entropy is one of the factors of heat, temperature being the other.—Engineering. I set up these bald statement as so many Aunt Sallys, for any one to shy at. [Lamenting a list of confused interpretations of the meaning of entropy, being hotly debated in journals at the time.]”

ScienceEntropyDefinitionMaxwellJames Clerk MaxwellJames MaxwellClausiusRudolf ClausiusRudolf Julius Emanuel ClausiusRobinsonPeter Guthrie TaitPeter TaitTait
Author:Sydney Herbert Evershed
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“Inventions were not like your children. Your children were all your flaws shown to you in a way that made you love them: your worst made good. Inventions were your best attempt at beautiful thought. They were objective; they worked or they did not. They had purpose, whether they achieved it or not. They were yours always, in that they did not leave you, or turn away.”

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Book:Light from Other Stars
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“Artists are agents of chaos. It is the artists job to encourage entropy, to promote chaos. Idols must be killed, icons crushed, beliefs shattered. It is the artists job to encourage legitimate, unadulterated, raw thought and emotion. Art that does nothing new, that simply fills an established role, is not art. It is a product. A stale, stagnant product of a disgustingly mundane process that has been done so much it is assumed mandatory. Little different than feces. The last thing the world needs is to get shittier.”

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Author:Jonathan Culver
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“There is nothing better than to have a highly motivated team of leaders focused on than reaching those far from Christ. And yet statistics and our experience reveal that evangelism entropy can creep deep inside a new church within months of its first public service. The longer we are around new churches the more amazed we are at how quickly these mission-focused, vibrant new churches become old.”

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Book:Church Planting Landmines
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“Stafford’s Law of Irreversible Entropy states: A system that achieved a perfect champagne alignment in its own era cannot be shoehorned back in once the environment has evolved or degenerated beyond it. This is the Staffordian Duality; it is immaterial whether global prospects improved or deteriorated; it only matters that the metric mirror of the past no longer reflects the current modern sinkhole. The most overcrowded vessel is the one that sails on the golden sea of memories.”

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Author:Stewart Stafford
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“For Serres, everything exists in at least three distinct broad temporalities (At 126–7) which can be further subdivided and combined in different ways. The fi rst time is the reversible, clockwork time of the classical age, when no fundamental law was thought to dictate the direction of time’s flow. The second time is the globally entropic time of the second law of thermodynamics, of Carnot’s heat engine that carries everything towards death. This thermodynamic principle was formalised in 1865 by Rudolph Clausius who, drawing heavily on Carnot’s work on heat engines, coined the term ‘entropy’ to describe the irrecoverable heat inevitably lost from any mechanical system. Laplace brings this irreversible time into the natural sciences with a cosmogony that supplements Newton’s reversible cosmology with a dimension of becoming (JVSH 36), and Darwin inscribes irreversible time at the heart of the natural sciences (JVSH 39). The eternal universe of Pascal is no more: ‘Immersed in time the universe likewise is born, develops, evolves, wears out and, perhaps, will die’ (JVSH 36).133 Time enters into science. The third time is the locally negentropic time of codes and information, preserving complexity against the general decay of order (H4 287).134 The idea of negentropy was developed in the 1930s, describing a pocket of information preserved in a wider context of entropic decay (see JVSH 136). It is a time encrusted in the living beings who ‘follow an evolution that Bergson called creative, of which we can at least say that it runs in the opposite direction to the thermodynamic arrow’ (H5 79) (Watkin 2020: 132)”

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Book:Michel Serres: Figures of Thought
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“It is very desirable to have a word to express the Availability for work of the heat in a given magazine; a term for that possession, the waste of which is called Dissipation. Unfortunately the excellent word Entropy, which Clausius has introduced in this connexion, is applied by him to the negative of the idea we most naturally wish to express. It would only confuse the student if we were to endeavour to invent another term for our purpose. But the necessity for some such term will be obvious from the beautiful examples which follow. And we take the liberty of using the term Entropy in this altered sense ... The entropy of the universe tends continually to zero.”

ScienceUniversePhysicsDesirableEntropyDissipationClausiusRudolf ClausiusRudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius
Book:Sketch Of Thermodynamics
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“It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. As Henry Ford said many years earlier: "If I had listened to my customers, I would have built a faster horse." Inventions in general express Shannon entropy. They come from the supply side.”

PeopleIfsKnowsWantYearsSaidHardShowsSidesFocusGroupsDesignProductsBuiltEconomicsHorseCustomersInventionFasterWant UEntropyFocus GroupsShannon
Book:Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World
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“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.”

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Book:Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World
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“What's important is how we use our time on this earth, not how conspicuously we give our money away. What's important is the energy and courage we are willing to expend reversing entropy, battling cynicism, suffering and challenging mediocre minds, staring down those who would trample our dreams, taking a stand for magic, and advancing the potential of the human race.”

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Author:Dan Pallotta
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“Now the work of art also represents a state of final equilibrium, of accomplished order and maximum relative entropy, and there are those who resent it. But art is not meant to stop the stream of life. Within a narrow span of duration and space the work of art concentrates a view of the human condition; and sometimes it marks the steps of progression, just as a man climbing the dark stairs of a medieval tower assures himself by the changing sights glimpsed through its narrow windows that he is getting somewhere after all.”

MenHumansArtSometimesStatesOrderDarkSpaceViewsStepsConditionsArt IsWindowSightMarkFinalsStreamsAccomplishedWorks Of ArtClimbingRelativeHuman ConditionTowersMaximumStairsMedievalProgressionResentEquilibriumDurationEntropy
Book:Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order
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