1. You cannot win.
2. You cannot break even.
3. You cannot get out of the game
— Anonymous.
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the
mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown.
— Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955).
Entropy is Time’s arrow
— Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 – 1944).
— Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893 – 1986), Light and Life (1961)
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
— T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965), ‘The Hollow Men’, 1925.
And compare ‘this is the way the world ends, not with a bang
but a whimper’ — incidentally, one of the least likely scientific prophecies
ever made — compare that with Rutherford’s famous repartee, ‘Lucky fellow,
Rutherford, always on the crest of a wave.’ ‘Well, I made the wave, didn’t I?’
— C. P. Snow (1905 – 1980), The Two
Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Rede Lecture, 1959.
The law that entropy always increases — the second law of
thermodynamics — holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature.
If [your pet theory of the universe] is found to be contradicted by observation
— well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory
is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope;
there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
— Sir Arthur Eddington (1882 – 1944) The
Nature of the Physical World, 1928.
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. Life rebels against all uniformity and
levelling; its aim is not sameness, but variety, the restlessness of
transcendence, the adventure of novelty and rebellion against the status quo.
— Vaclav Havel, Czech playwright (and later president), ‘Letter to Dr Gustav
Husak’ in Living in Truth, Faber
1989, 23.
The order [authority] strives for is no frank quest for ever
higher forms of social self-organization, equivalent to its evolving complexity
of structure, but, on the contrary, a decline towards that ‘state of maximum
probability’ representing the climax of entropy. Following the direction of entropy, it goes against the direction of life.
— Vaclav Havel, Czech playwright (and later president), ‘Letter to Dr Gustav
Husak’ in Living in Truth, Faber
1989, 24.
But this fifh hath the amazing power of giving fo fudden and
fo violent a fhock to any person who touches it, that there is, I think, an
abfolute impoffibility of ever examining accurately a living specimen; and the
perfon who owns them rates them at too high a price (not lefs than fifty
guineas for the fmalleft) for me to get a dead fpecimen … George Baker,
mariner, who brought them here [from Surinam to South Carolina] intends to
carry them to England…
The perfon to whom thefe animals belong, calls them electrical fifh; and indeed the power
they have of giving an electrical fhock to any perfon, or to any number of
perfons who join hands together … is their moft fingular and aftonifhing
property.
— Alexander Garden of South Carolina to the Royal Society, 1774.
An interesting feature of these high energy currents is that
they allow to operate all kinds of devices by connecting the device with only
one leading wire to the source. In fact, under certain conditions it may be
more economical to supply the electrical energy with one lead than with two.
An experiment of particular interest is the running, by use
of only one insulated line, of a motor operating on the principle of the
rotating magnetic field enunciated by the author a few years ago. A simple form
of such a motor is obtained by winding upon a laminated iron core a primary and
a close to it a secondary coil, closing the ends of the latter and placing a
freely movable metal disc within the influence of the moving field. The
secondary coil may, however, be omitted. When one of the ends of the primary
coil is connected to one of the terminals of the high-frequency coil and the
other end to an insulated metal plate, which, it should be stated, is not
absolutely necessary for the success of the experiment, the disc is set in
motion.
— Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943), addressing the Royal Institution in 1892.
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