07 December 2020

On Entropy (1960-1969)

"Science is usually understood to depict a universe of strict order and lawfulness, of rigorous economy - one whose currency is energy, convertible against a service charge into a growing common pool called entropy." (Paul A Weiss,"Organic Form: Scientific and Aesthetic Aspects", 1960)

"The basic objection to attempts to deduce the unidirectional nature of time from concepts such as entropy is that they are attempts to reduce a more fundamental concept to a less fundamental one." (Gerald J Whitrow, "The Natural Philosophy of Time", 1961)

"Both the uncertainty principle and the negentropy principle of information make Laplace's scheme [of exact determinism] completely unrealistic. The problem is an artificial one; it belongs to imaginative poetry, not to experimental science." (Léon Brillouin, "Science and Information Theory" 2nd Ed., 1962)

"Entropy is a measure of the heat energy in a substance that has been lost and is no longer available for work. It is a measure of the deterioration of a system." (William B. Sill & Norman Hoss (Eds.), "Popular Science Encyclopedia of the Sciences", 1963)

"The homeostatic principle does not apply literally to the functioning of all complex living systems, in that in counteracting entropy they move toward growth and expansion." (Daniel Katz, "The Social Psychology of Organizations", 1966) 

"Higher, directed forms of energy (e.g., mechanical, electric, chemical) are dissipated, that is, progressively converted into the lowest form of energy, i.e., undirected heat movement of molecules; chemical systems tend toward equilibria with maximum entropy; machines wear out owing to friction; in communication channels, information can only be lost by conversion of messages into noise but not vice versa, and so forth." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "Robots, Men and Minds", 1967)

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