71 Thermodynamics Quotes
Following is our list of thermodynamics quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .
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Famous Thermodynamics Quotes
It is just physics - who can argue with Newton and the first law of thermodynamics? — Mark Hyman, M.D.
Classical thermodynamics ... is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced ... will never be overthrown. — Albert Einstein
Thermodynamics, correctly interpreted, does not just allow Darwinian evolution; it favors it. — Ludwig Boltzmann
The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. — Rudolf Clausius
In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you. — Frank Wilczek
Available energy is the main object at stake in the struggle for existence and the evolution of the world. — Ludwig Boltzmann
Question: Who governs the governors? Answer: Entropy — Frank Herbert
Heat may be generated and destroyed by certain processes, and this shows that heat is not a substance. — James Clerk Maxwell
Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed — Antoine Lavoisier
There is no energy in matter other than that received from the environment — Nikola Tesla
Only entropy comes easy. — Lewis Mumford
The laws of physics can’t predict the future. — Naval Ravikant
A physical law must possess mathematical beauty. — Paul Dirac
Entropy is the price of structure. — Ilya Prigogine
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
Short Thermodynamics Quotes
- The Second Law of Thermodynamics: If you think things are in a mess now, just wait! — Jim Warner
- The use of thermodynamics in biology has a long history rich in confusion. — Harold Morowitz
- Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. — Seth Lloyd
- Cost is always an object - the second law of thermodynamics sees to that — Daniel Dennett
Second Law Of Thermodynamics Quotes
I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer - born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow. — Neil Armstrong
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases. — Norman Ralph Augustine
The algebraic sum of all the transformations occurring in a cyclical process can only be positive, or, as an extreme case, equal to nothing. Statement of the second law of thermodynamics, 1862 — Rudolf Clausius
Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one. — Clay Shirky
We define thermodynamics ... as the investigation of the dynamical and thermal properties of bodies, deduced entirely from the first and second law of thermodynamics, without speculation as to the molecular constitution. — James Clerk Maxwell
I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage. — Alan Lightman
Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can't have a safer bet than that! — Stephen Hawking
People Writing About Thermodynamics
More Thermodynamics Quotes
Comparing that to mathematics, if necessary truth is the subject matter of mathematics, mathematicians are engaged in creating knowledge about necessary truth. Because a mathematician has a brain—which is a physical object—and all physical objects are subject to making errors of degradation via the second law of thermodynamics—or simply the usual mental mistakes and errors that any human being makes—a mathematician is just as fallible as anyone else. So what they end up proving could be in error. — Naval Ravikant
Evolutionism as taught by Darwinism has nothing to say about how life originated. Has nothing to say about how the governing principles in the universe, gravity, thermodynamics, motion, how those originated. It's got some gigantic missing pieces. — Sayings
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906 by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. — David Goodstein
Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Bitcoin is a deep understanding of unbreakable laws (mathematics, thermodynamics, individual self-interest) woven into an unstoppable application. — Robert Breedlove
Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn't bother you any more. — Arnold Sommerfeld
It is a remarkable fact that the second law of thermodynamics has played in the history of science a fundamental role far beyond its original scope. Suffice it to mention Boltzmann's work on kinetic theory, Planck's discovery of quantum theory or Einstein's theory of spontaneous emission, which were all based on the second law of thermodynamics. — Ilya Prigogine
To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation. — Derrick Jensen
It has never been in my power to study anything, mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic . — Charles Sanders Peirce
Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero. — David R. Ellis
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 production of motion in the steam engine always occurs in circumstances which it is necessary to recognize, namely when the equilibrium of caloric is restored, or (to express this differently) when caloric passes from the body at one temperature to another body at a lower temperature. — Nicolas Leonard Sadi Carnot
The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again. — James Clerk Maxwell
I know just enough about thermodynamics to understand that if it takes too much fossil-fuel energy to create ethanol, that's a very stupid way to solve an energy problem. — Charlie Munger
Darwinism doesn't explain where gravity comes from. It doesn't explain where thermodynamics comes from. It doesn't explain where the laws of physics come from. It doesn't explain where matter comes from. — Ben Stein
Willard Gibbs did for statistical mechanics and for thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure. — Robert Andrews Millikan
If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it 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. — Arthur Eddington
It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance. — Barry Commoner
Once I got home, I sulked for a while. All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy! — Andy Weir
In all cases where work is produced by heat, a quantity of heat proportional to the work done is expended; and inversely, by the expenditure of a like quantity of work, the same amount of heat may be produced. — Rudolf Clausius
The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics. — Terry Pratchett
Regarding the Laws of Thermodynamics: "(1) You can't win, (2) you can't break even, and (3) you can't get out of the game. — Dennis Overbye
Man's destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young. — E. O. Wilson
According to Bastardi, human-induced climate change "contradicts what we call the 1st law of thermodynamics. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. So to look for input of energy into the atmosphere, you have to come from a foreign source. — Joe Bastardi
Aging is a staircase - the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity. As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy means that everything in the world, everything, is in a state of decline and decay, the arch. There's only one exception to this universal law, and that is the human spirit, which can continue to evolve upwards. — Jane Fonda
The laws of thermodynamic s are such that if the water is getting warmer - and I believe it is - the energy of the weather is going to go up. — Charlie Munger
There were a number of particularly delightful incidents. There is, for example, the physicist who introduced me to one of my favorite laws, which he described as Murphys law or the fourth law of thermodynamics (actually there were only three last I heard) which states: If anything can go wrong it will. — Anne Roe
I find the big bang, really quite fascinating. I mean, here you have all these highfalutin scientists and they're saying it was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order. Now these are the same scientists that go around touting the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, which says that things move toward a state of disorganization. — Benjamin Carson
If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History. — Henry Adams
In the complex course of its evolution, life exhibits a remarkable contrast to the tendency expressed in the Second Law to Thermodynamics. Where the Second Law expressed an irreversible progression toward increased entropy and disorder, life evolves continually higher levels of order. The still more remarkable fact is that this evolutionary drive to greater and greater order also is irreversible. Evolution does not go backward. — J. H. Rush
Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like "optics" or "thermodynamics" are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections. — Ted Chiang
Every heat engineer knows he can design his heat engine reliably and accurately on the foundation of the second law [of thermodynamics]. Run alongside one of the molecules, however, and ask it what it thinks of the second law. It will laugh at us. It never heard of the second law. It does what it wants. All the same, a collection of billions upon billions of such molecules obeys the second law with all the accuracy one could want — John Archibald Wheeler
The laws of thermodynamics may be regarded as particular cases of more general laws, applicable to all such states of matter as constitute Energy , or the capacity to perform work, which more general laws form the basis of the science of energetics, a science comprehending, as special branches, the theories of motion, heat, light , electricity , and all other physical phenomena. — William John Macquorn Rankine
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