Zitat des Tages über Entropie / 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.
We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography.
Only entropy comes easy.
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.
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.
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.
Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.
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.
I'm a human entropy producer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
