Wilhelm Wien Quotes

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

If you assume that it was a valid experiment, then its disintegration reveals a very substantial part of what has been found since then, including the fact that you can get heat generation at high temperature.

If your theory is found to be against the second law of theromodynamics, I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography.

In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero.

An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics.

If we assume there is no maximum possible entropy for the universe, then any state can be a state of low entropy.

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.

I'm trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it's interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It's all because of entropy increasing.

If, as is the custom, I speak mainly about my own researches, I must say that I was fortunate in finding that not everything had yet been gleaned in the field of general thermodynamic radiation theory.

If there's no limit to how big the entropy can get, then you can start anywhere, and from that starting point, you'd expect entropy to rise as the system moves to explore larger and larger regions of phase space.

Local order in parts of the universe is always possible at the expense of heat and disorder dissipated to the external environment. The human body is one example: we take in energy from our environment to build up complex molecules that help power our bodies, and, in doing so, we release heat to the world around us.

The weird thing about the arrow of time is that it's not to be found in the underlying laws of physics. It's not there. So it's a feature of the universe we see, but not a feature of the laws of the individual particles. So the arrow of time is built on top of whatever local laws of physics apply.

Something can be real - actually existing, not merely illusory - and yet not be fundamental. Scientists used to think that heat, for example, was a fluidlike substance called 'caloric' that flowed from hot objects to colder ones.

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

When I was studying at Purdue, we learned our thermodynamics from an antique steam engine. When I went back in 1964, I found the laboratories packed with the most modern equipment for the study of thermodynamics, some of which had been built by the students themselves.

'Entropy' broadly means tending towards chaos constantly.

Entropy and optimism: the twin forces that make the world go around.

Nature prefers the more probable states to the less probable because in nature processes take place in the direction of greater probability. Heat goes from a body at higher temperature to a body at lower temperature because the state of equal temperature distribution is more probable than a state of unequal temperature distribution.

You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.

Classical thermodynamics ... is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced ... will never be overthrown.

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.

Although wherever you are going is always in front of you, there is no such thing as straight ahead.