Information Entropy Quotes & Sayings

The Second Law of Thermodynamics defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly. — Steven Pinker

The economy of early hominids and that of twenty-first century society have enormous differences, but they do share one important feature: in both of these economies, humans accumulate information in objects. Our world is different from that of early hominids only in the way in which atoms are arranged. — Cesar Hidalgo

I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices under water. — Jeanette Winterson

Two observations take us across the finish line. The Second Law ensures that entropy increases throughout the entire process, and so the information hidden within the hard drives, Kindles, old-fashioned paper books, and everything else you packed into the region is less than that hidden in the black hole. From the results of Bekenstein and Hawking, we know that the black hole's hidden information content is given by the area of its event horizon. Moreover, because you were careful not to overspill the original region of space, the black hole's event horizon coincides with the region's boundary, so the black hole's entropy equals the area of this surrounding surface. We thus learn an important lesson. The amount of information contained within a region of space, stored in any objects of any design, is always less than the area of the surface that surrounds the region (measured in square Planck units). — Brian Greene

Economic growth springs not chiefly from incentives - carrots and sticks, rewards and punishments for workers and entrepreneurs. The incentive theory of capitalism allows its critics to depict it as an inhumane scheme of clever manipulation of human needs and hungers scarcely superior to the more benign forms of slavery. Wealth actually springs from the expansion of information and learning, profits and creativity that enhance the human qualities of its beneficiaries as it enriches them. Workers' learning increasingly compensates for their labor, which imparts knowledge as it extracts work. Joining knowledge and power, capitalism focuses on the entropy of human minds and the benefits of freedom. Thus it is the most humane of all economic systems. — George Gilder

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

What those two young physicists did remains the most important step yet made in the search for quantum gravity. They gave us two general and simple laws, which were the first physical predictions to come from the study of quantum gravity. They are: Unruh's law. Accelerating observers see themselves as embedded in a gas of hot photons at a temperature proportional to their acceleration. Bekenstein's law With every horizon that forms a boundary separating an observer from a region which is hidden from them, there is associated an entropy which measures the amount of information which is hidden behind it. This entropy is always proportional to the area of the horizon. — Lee Smolin

In a physical system, information is the opposite of entropy, as it involves uncommon and highly correlated configurations that are difficult to arrive at. — Cesar Hidalgo

It was not easy for a person brought up in the ways of classical thermodynamics to come around to the idea that gain of entropy eventually is nothing more nor less than loss of information. — Gilbert N. Lewis

The system failed not because it was rational, but because rational choice in the face of massive ignorance - whether attributable to folly or deceit - is meaningless. Capitalism depends not on the freedom to choose but on the free flow of information across a low-entropy carrier. Corrupt the carrier with noise, and capitalism collapses. And the great corrupter of any carrier, the great generator of destructive noise, is power. And in this case the powers assembled were immense. — George Gilder

He might as well be dressed in furs and carrying a spear, presenting me with the boar he'd caught for dinner. Ah, good old-fashioned Stone Age romance. — Kylie Scott

In brain scans, music lights up the medial prefrontal cortex and triggers a memory that starts playing in your mind. All of a sudden you can see a place, a person, an incident. The strongest responses to music - the ones that elicit vivid memories - cause the greatest activity on brain scans. — Jodi Picoult

A.N. Kolmogorov and Yasha Sinai had worked out some illuminating mathematics for the way a system's "entropy per unite time" applies to the geometric pictures of surfaces stretching and folding in phase space. The conceptual core of the technique was a matter of drawing some arbitrarily small box around some set of initial conditions, as one might draw a small square on the side of a balloon, then calculating the effect of various expressions or twists on the box. It might stretch in one direction, for example, while remaining narrow in the other. The change in area corresponded to an introduction of uncertainty about the system's past, a gain or loss of information. — James Gleick

Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable. To avoid this condition, people are naturally eager to fill their minds with whatever information is readily available, as long as it distracts attention from turning inward and dwelling on negative feelings. This explains why such a huge proportion of time is invested in watching television, despite the fact that it is very rarely enjoyed. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

This is a grave danger: the stoppage of information between the parts of the planet. Contemporary science knows that such stoppage is the way of entropy, of universal destruction. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The macromolecules of organic life embody information in an intricate structure. A single hemoglobin molecule comprises four chains of polypeptides, two with 141 amino acids and two with 146, in strict linear sequence, bonded and folded together. Atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and iron could mingle randomly for the lifetime of the universe and be no more likely to form hemoglobin than the proverbial chimpanzees to type the works of Shakespeare. Their genesis requires energy; they are built up from simpler, less patterned parts, and the law of entropy applies. For earthly life, the energy comes as photons from the sun. The information comes via evolution. — James Gleick

Go out and do something. It isn't your room that's a prison, it's yourself. — Sylvia Plath

Entropy is not about speeds or positions of particles, the way temperature and pressure and volume are, but about our lack of information. — Hans Christian Von Baeyer

You know, entropy is associated thermodynamically, in systems involving heat, with disorder. And in an analogous way, information is associated with disorder, which seems paradoxical. But when you think about it, a bit of information is a surprise. If you already knew what the message contained, there would be no new information in it. — James Gleick

Von Neumann told Shannon to call his measure entropy, since no one knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage. — Jeremy Campbell

Information ... exhausts itself in the staging of meaning ... [and leads] not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy — Jean Baudrillard

The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects. — John C. Wright

Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy: — James Gleick

It made their minds brittle and caught them in a dream that fractured them. We didn't see. I didn't see. The corruption spread unnoticed, and then it shattered. They killed each other over nothing. Over the colors of their shirts or their eyes, whether they drank before they ate or ate before they drank. Whether they ate beef or fowl. Anything became a pretext for murder. — Anonymous

Everyone, no matter how refined, had a stash of porn. — Tinnean

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. — Brian Cox

If laughter is one of the best medicines in life ... laughing at yourself is a conducive pill. — Timothy Pina

entropy is always lurking on the borders of information-rich anomalies, — Cesar Hidalgo

Information is entropy. This was the strangest and most powerful notion of all. — James Gleick