A Quote by Sean M. Carroll

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.

Sean M. Carroll

Quote Topics

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Quote Author

Sean M. Carroll
American - Scientist
Born: October 5, 1966

The arrow of time doesn't move forward forever. There's a phase in the history of the universe where you go from low entropy to high entropy. But then, once you reach the locally maximum entropy you can get to, there's no more arrow of time.

Sean M. Carroll

I'm trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it's interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It's all because of entropy increasing.

Sean M. Carroll

Use "entropy" and you can never lose a debate, von Neumann told Shannon - because no one really knows what "entropy" is.

William Poundstone

If there's no limit to how big the entropy can get, then you can start anywhere, and from that starting point, you'd expect entropy to rise as the system moves to explore larger and larger regions of phase space.

Alan Guth

If we assume there is no maximum possible entropy for the universe, then any state can be a state of low entropy.

Alan Guth

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.

Vaclav Havel

In an expanding universe, order is not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

Norbert Wiener

Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.

Fred Brooks

One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one's just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy.

Aldous Huxley

The revelation we've come to is that we can trust our memories of a past with lower, not higher, entropy only if the big bang - the process, event, or happening that brought the universe into existence - started off the universe in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.

Brian Greene

[A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.

Erwin Schrodinger

I despise the fact that the youth today acts as if being youthful is the answer to everything. It's a very young minded perspective and if you're not smart enough to realize that in life evolution is real. What that means is, we all are evolving and getting older every second of the day. That means it's about what you know, what you do and how hard you press the button to make it go. If you're not willing to put it in the time, energy and work in, then it doesn't matter how young you are. You'll be here and gone tomorrow if you don't learn something.