A Quote by Neil Armstrong

I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer - born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.

Neil Armstrong

Quote Topics

Am Body Born Diagrams Engineer Ever Flow Free Law Love Nerdy Pocket Protector Second Socks Steam Tables Thermodynamics Transformed White Will

Quote Author

Neil Armstrong
American - Astronaut
August 5, 1930 - August 25, 2012

I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer.

Neil Armstrong

I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer.

Neil Armstrong

Every heat engineer knows he can design his heat engine reliably and accurately on the foundation of the second law [of thermodynamics]. Run alongside one of the molecules, however, and ask it what it thinks of the second law. It will laugh at us. It never heard of the second law. It does what it wants. All the same, a collection of billions upon billions of such molecules obeys the second law with all the accuracy one could want

John Archibald Wheeler

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

Seth Lloyd

It is often said that the progression from simple to complex runs counter to the normal statistics of chance that are formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, we could avoid this criticism simply by insisting that the Second Law does not apply to living systems in the environment in which we find them. For the Second Law applies only when there is no overall flow of energy into or out of a system, whereas all living systems are sustained by a net inflow of energy.

Jacob Bronowski

It is a remarkable fact that the second law of thermodynamics has played in the history of science a fundamental role far beyond its original scope. Suffice it to mention Boltzmann's work on kinetic theory, Planck's discovery of quantum theory or Einstein's theory of spontaneous emission, which were all based on the second law of thermodynamics.

Ilya Prigogine

We define thermodynamics ... as the investigation of the dynamical and thermal properties of bodies, deduced entirely from the first and second law of thermodynamics, without speculation as to the molecular constitution.

James Clerk Maxwell

Of all the statements that have been made with respect to theories on the origin of life, the statement that the Second Law of Thermodynamics poses no problem for an evolutionary origin of life is the most absurd… The operation of natural processes on which the Second Law of Thermodynamics is based is alone sufficient, therefore, to preclude the spontaneous evolutionary origin of the immense biological order required for the origin of life.

Duane Gish

Evolution in the biosphere is therefore a necessarily irreversible process defining a direction in time; a direction which is the same as that enjoined by the law of increasing entropy, that is to say, the second law of thermodynamics. This is far more than a mere comparison: the second law is founded upon considerations identical to those which establish the irreversibility of evolution. Indeed, it is legitimate to view the irreversibility of evolution as an expression of the second law in the biosphere.

Jacques Monod

[O]ur own bodies are changing every second. Yet we take the body to be our Self; and, speaking in terms of it, we say, “I am hungry” or “I am lame”; “I am black” or “I am white.” These are all just the conditions of the body. We touch the truth when we say, “My body aches,” implying the body belongs to us and that therefore we are not that. (87)

Swami Satchidananda

There is only one law of Nature-the second law of thermodynamics-which recognises a distinction between past and future more profound than the difference of plus and minus. It stands aloof from all the rest. ... It opens up a new province of knowledge, namely, the study of organisation; and it is in connection with organisation that a direction of time-flow and a distinction between doing and undoing appears for the first time.

Arthur Eddington

When I was studying at Purdue, we learned our thermodynamics from an antique steam engine. When I went back in 1964, I found the laboratories packed with the most modern equipment for the study of thermodynamics, some of which had been built by the students themselves.

Gus Grissom

Cost is always an object - the second law of thermodynamics sees to that

Daniel Dennett

I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.