#entropy

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

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

The ruling passion of the age is to convert wealth into debt in order to derive a permanent future income from it - to convert wealth that perishes into debt that endures, debt that does not rot, costs nothing to maintain, and brings in perennial interest. ↗

— Frederick Soddy

#entropy #interest #money #wealth #age

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

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment. ↗

— Derrick Jensen

#entropy #environmental-degradation #global-industrial-economy #impoverishment #economy

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. ↗

— Rudolf Arnheim

#been #deal #dealing #elements #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. ↗

— Rudolf Arnheim

#concerned #distribution #entropy #given #hand

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

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. ↗

— Chris Cleave

#antithesis #beautiful #celebrates #death #dissolution

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