Jasper Fforde Quotes

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.

Entropy requires no maintenance.

Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

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

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.

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.

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.

Millions for nonsense, but not one cent for entropy.

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?

The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum.

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.

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

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

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

Shuffling is the only thing which Nature cannot undo.

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

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

You're an entropic chaos factor

The total disorder in the universe, as measured by the quantity that physicists call entropy, increases steadily over time. Also, the total order in the universe, as measured by the complexity and permanence of organized structures, also increases steadily over time.

All things tend toward entropy. The whole universe is moving outward, the stars pulling away from one another, God knows what falling through the cracks between them.

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.