The 2nd law of thermodynamics... tells you that randomness increases with time. It's a sort of depressing law... It depends on how you look at it, re… - Roger Penrose

" "

The 2nd law of thermodynamics... tells you that randomness increases with time. It's a sort of depressing law... It depends on how you look at it, really...

English
Collect this quote

About Roger Penrose

Sir Roger Penrose (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematical physicist and Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, famous for his work in mathematical physics, cosmology, general relativity, and his musings on the nature of consciousness.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: R. Penrose Sir Roger Penrose
Works in ChatGPT, Claude, or Any AI

Add semantic quote search to your AI assistant via MCP. One command setup.

Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.

Additional quotes by Roger Penrose

[T]here's a version of this a version of this idea which John Wheeler has promoted, which is that in each of these cycles, since nobody really knows what goes on at the crunch, bang stage... you can... invent any physics you like, and one idea... is to suggest that the... fundamental constants of nature might get changed every time you go through one of these cycles... [T]his might help to explain... puzzles that... the constants have to be just such and such in order that life should exist...[etc.] I always have trouble with many of these arguments. It's not at all clear whether you need them or not. They might be true but we don't know. It may be that these numbers are fixed and they might change through each cycle...[etc.] but our current physics... doesn't allow this kind of thing. These are singular states according to classical theory. Maybe if we had quantum gravity... one could imagine such a scheme...

Limited Time Offer

Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.

[T]he randomness is measured... by... entropy, and it's telling us that this entropy is increasing with time. ...[I]t can be given a clearer definition ...the idea due to Boltzmann ...we imagine... a ... a space... of a very large number of dimensions, where each point in the space represents a state of the system at one moment. In fact it contains both the positions of all the particles and the momenta (or velocities) of all the particles. So if you know where the point is in this large dimensional space at any moment that describes a particular thing... then the dynamics will tell you where that point moves. So that there will be a unique path through that point, wiggling around somewhere through this phase space.

Loading...