#entropy

Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#rebel #rebellion #revolution #revolution

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. ↗

— Walter Lang

#animal #animal life #before #entropy #exactly

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

#arrive #could #entropy #example #for example

Things fall apart, even when you think they're stronger than anything you could ever imagine. ↗

— Susane Colasanti

#imagination

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. ↗

— Vaclav Havel

#basic #constant #entropy #ever #highly

I'm a human entropy producer. ↗

— Dean Kamen

#human #i #producer

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

#billions #come #decisions #entropy #inside

Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine; Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine! Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And universal darkness buries all. ↗

— Alexander Pope

#entropy #anarchism

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

#difficult #entropy #grasp #i #increases

We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe. ↗

— James Gleick

#entropy #information #maxwell #organization #experience