A Quote by James Gleick

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

James Gleick

Quote Topics

Entropy History History Of Life Life Life Is Negative Terms The History Of Written

Quote Author

James Gleick
American - Author
Born: August 1, 1954

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

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

We must create a history of India in living terms. Up to the present that history, as written by the English, practically begins with Warren Hastings, and crams in certain unavoidable preliminaries, which cover a few thousands of years...The history of India has yet to be written for the first time. It has to be humanized, emotionalized, made the trumpet-voice and evangel of the race that inhabit India.

Sister Nivedita

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

[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

The organism feeds on negative entropy.

Erwin Schrodinger

Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

Hans Haacke

The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.

Fulton J. Sheen

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

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

William Poundstone

Who do you suppose invented computers? Speaking in terms relevant to you, in terms of earth history, let alone other worldly history, the computer, of course, came from Atlantis.

Frederick Lenz

In the past, history was always written by the victors. But in the age of Twitter, history is written by everyone.

Nick Bilton

It is unfortunate that so much of the history of Africa has been written by conquerors, foreigners, missionaries and adventurers. The Egyptians left the best record of their history written by local writers.

John Henrik Clarke

[Alex Hayley] wanted to show the negative aspects of the N.O.I.'s ideology, Yacub's history, and all of the ramifications of racial separatism that he felt were negative, and that Malcolm, being as charismatic as he was, a very attractive figure, nevertheless, he embodied these kind of negative traits.

Manning Marable

Fossils work almost the same way as photography as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography.