{"quotes":[{"text":"He saw two stars collapse against one another and a nova form; it flared up and then, as he watched, it began to die out. He saw it turn from a furiously blazing ring into a dim core of dead iron and then he saw it cool into darkness. More stars cooled with it; he saw the force of entropy, the method of the Destroyer of Forms, retract the stars into dull reddish coals and then into dust-like silence. A shroud of thermal energy hung uniformly over the world,over this strange and little world for which he had no love or use.It's dying, he realized. The universe. The thermal haze spread on and on until it became only a disturbance, nothing more; the sky glowed weakly with it and then flickered. Even the uniform thermal disbursement was expiring. How strange and goddamn awful, he thought. He got to his feet, moved a step toward the door.And there, on his feet, he died.They found him an hour later. Seth Morley stood with his wife at the far end of the knot of people jammed into the small room and said to himself, 'to keep him from helping with the prayer'. 'The same force that shut down the transmitter,' Ignatz Thugg said. 'They knew; they knew if he phrased the prayer it would go through. Even without the relay.' He looked gray and frightened. All of them did, Seth Morley noticed. Their faces, in the light of the room, had a leaden, stone-like cast. Like, he thought, thousand-year-old idols.Time, he thought, is shutting down around us. It is as if the future is gone, for all of us.","author":"Philip K. Dick","tags":["death","entropy","maze-of-death","philip-k-dick","reality","time"],"id":3832,"author_id":"Philip+K.+Dick"},{"text":"Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty...The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things- from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel, to a first date, to last words, to a Turing test...Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we're least certain. And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask the question of qhose answer we're least certain... Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.","author":"Brian Christian","tags":["entropy","information"],"id":48363,"author_id":"Brian+Christian"},{"text":"As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. 'Life is a journey, not a destination.' Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination.","author":"Colson Whitehead","tags":["destinations","entropy","journeys","ralph-waldo-emerson","travel"],"id":48366,"author_id":"Colson+Whitehead"},{"text":"I’d 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.","author":"Mark O'Connell","tags":["bus","entropy","immortality","metaphor","texas","transhumanism"],"id":49847,"author_id":"Mark+O%27Connell"},{"text":"When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?","author":"Tom Stoppard","tags":["entropy","time"],"id":54008,"author_id":"Tom+Stoppard"},{"text":"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.","author":"César A. Hidalgo","tags":["anthropocene","big-history","entropy","evolution","information","society"],"id":77520,"author_id":"C%C3%A9sar+A.+Hidalgo"},{"text":"How do you say, 'Do things for me without me asking you to' since in saying that, you are asking them?","author":"Joshua Edward Smith","tags":["asking","difficult","do","duality","entropy","for","me","question","things","to","without","you"],"id":80651,"author_id":"Joshua+Edward+Smith"},{"text":"Creativity is our only weapon against entropy.","author":"Dean Cavanagh","tags":["creativity","entropy"],"id":88240,"author_id":"Dean+Cavanagh"},{"text":"According to Lamarck, there was a force—the ‘power of life’—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.","author":"Elizabeth Kolbert","tags":["entropy","evolution","forces"],"id":142740,"author_id":"Elizabeth+Kolbert"},{"text":"Nothing is lost. . .Everything is transformed.","author":"Michael Ende","tags":["change","entropy","fantasy","taoism"],"id":150304,"author_id":"Michael+Ende"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":35,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}