23 January 2021

On Entropy (Unsourced)

"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." (Václav Havel, [Letter to Gustáv Husák]) 

"Only highly ordered and structured systems can display complex creative and unpredictable behaviour, and then only if they have the capacity to act with a degree of freedom and randomness. Systems which lack structure and organisation usually fail to produce anything much, they just tend to drift down the entropy gradient. This applies both to people and to organisations." (Peter J Carroll)

"Some of the science literature on entropy erroneously assumes that, as one goes forward in time, one moves from order to disorder. Naturally this is erroneous for the simple reason that there is no such thing as disorder; there is only complexity within simplicity." (Wald Wassermann)

"You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage." (John von Neumann) [Suggesting to Claude Shannon a name for his new uncertainty function, see Scientific American Vol. 225 (3), 1971] 

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