entropy

We all behave like Maxwell__ demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as __uperintelligent,_ but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.

I__ begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.

Artists are agents of chaos. It is the artistsjob to encourage entropy, to promote chaos. Idols must be killed, icons crushed, beliefsshattered. It is the artists job to encourage legitimate, unadulterated, raw thought andemotion. Art that does nothing new, that simply fills an established role, is not art.It is a product. A stale, stagnant product of a disgustingly mundane process that has beendone so much it is assumed mandatory. Little different than feces. The last thing the world needs is to get shittier.

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.

How do you say, 'Do things for me without me asking you to' since in saying that, you are asking them?

Oceans recede and coastlines wither and crack. Nations lapse; others soon swagger in their places. Mountains crumble to dust, rains vanish into the sea, winds return whence they came, and every city men build has but a jumble of bones for its foundation. What is your need to me? I am the Watcher in the Dark.

Gordon Van Wylen, Chairman of the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan commented that, __he question that arises is how the universe got into the state of reduced entropy in the first place, since all natural processes known to us tend to increase entropy?_ (Gordon Van Wylen and Richard Edwin Sonntag, Fundamentals of Classical Thermodynamics, 1973). He concludes by saying, __he author has found that the second law [of thermodynamics] tends to increase conviction that there is a Creator.

According to Lamarck, there was a force__he __ower of life___hat pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind.

It is very desirable to have a word to express the Availability for work of the heat in a given magazine; a term for that possession, the waste of which is called Dissipation. Unfortunately the excellent word Entropy, which Clausius has introduced in this connexion, is applied by him to the negative of the idea we most naturally wish to express. It would only confuse the student if we were to endeavour to invent another term for our purpose. But the necessity for some such term will be obvious from the beautiful examples which follow. And we take the liberty of using the term Entropy in this altered sense ... The entropy of the universe tends continually to zero.

The fundamental laws of the universe which correspond to the two fundamental theorems of the mechanical theory of heat.1. The energy of the universe is constant.2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.

The universe is full of fuel.

You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arrival of time known as the heat death, when all stars have died, all black holes have evaporated away and the entirety of creation is a uniform bath of photons incapable of storing a single bit of information about the glorious adolescence of our wonderful Universe.

Human says time goes by -Time says human goes by