Robert Anton Wilson Quotes

The universe always moves from an ordered state to a disordered one; that a glass may fall to the ground and shatter yet you never see a broken glass reassemble itself and then jump back on the table.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

'Entropy' broadly means tending towards chaos constantly.

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)

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

So far as physics is concerned, time's arrow is a property of entropy alone.

You may see a cup of tea fall off a table and break into pieces on the floor... But you will never see the cup gather itself back together and jump back on the table. The increase of disorder, or entropy, is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.

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?

Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.

Question: Who governs the governors? Answer: Entropy

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.

Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.

It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.

I'm a human entropy producer.

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

Only entropy comes easy.

Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.

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

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

You're an entropic chaos factor

Millions for nonsense, but not one cent for entropy.

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

What do we measure when we measure time? The gloomy answer from Hawking, one of our most implacably cheerful scientists, is that we measure entropy. We measure changes and those changes are all for the worse. We measure increasing disorder. Life is hard, says science, and constancy is the greatest of miracles.

In high school, when I first heard of entropy, I was attracted to it immediately. They said that in nature all systems are breaking down, and I thought, What a wonderful thing; perhaps I can make some small contribution to this process, myself.