Jeremy Campbell > Quotes

“Von Neumann told Shannon to call his measure entropy, since "no one knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”
― Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life

“Energy was the ruling theme of Victorian science, as machines increasingly harnessed the forces of nature to do man's work. The concept is also present in the art and literature of the age, notably in the poems of William Blake. The Romantic movement was much interested in energy and its various transformations.”
― Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life

“In Machiavelli, as in Darwin, nature is set against nature. Fortuna, impersonal blind chance, the agency of floods, havoc-wreaking storms and plagues, confronts virtù, the power of mind to outwit the entropic, leveling tendencies of physical forces. The essence of virtù is to be clever and strong, and it is ethically neutral.”
― Jeremy Campbell, The Liar's Tale: A Social History of Falsehood

“Probability is essentially the assigning of a numerical value to each possible event, a number which represents knowledge. But that knowledge may be different for different people. We invent certain kinds of situation in which everyone has the same information: cards, dice, coins. The mistake lies in trying to reduce all uncertain processes to this category. The task of a theory of probability is to find a way of encoding different kinds of knowledge, assigning probabilities to them, in just the right way. And that is also the task of a theory of information. For example, if the person I am talking to knows a great deal about science, I can tell him facts more easily. I use fewer words. For a person who knows very little, I would have to say more. My code will not be the same as your code if I know more than you do.”
― Jeremy Campbell, GRAMMATICAL MAN: Information, Entropy,Language and Life

“Time’s arrow is irreversible, because entropy cannot decrease of its own accord without violating the second law of thermodynamics. A reversible arrow would be like a movie run backward. The scenes in the movie are not impossible by the laws of classical mechanics, but they are patently absurd.”
― Jeremy Campbell, GRAMMATICAL MAN: Information, Entropy,Language and Life