2. Quotes
(Order in Chaos)
"Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity in the city's chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, of national politics,
of any civil disorder." [83f]
(Heat-Death)
"The cosmologists had predicted an eventual heat-death for the universe (something like Limbo: form and motion abolished, heat-energy
identical at every point in it); the meteorologists, day-to-day, staved it off by contradicting with a reassuring array of varied
temperatures." [85]
(Heat-Death/Entropy)
"Callisto had learned a mnemonic device for remembering the Laws of Thermodynamics: you can't win, things are going to get worse before
they get better, who says they're going to get better. [..] That spindly maze of equations became, for him, a vision of ultimate, cosmic
heat-death. He had known all along that nothing but a theoretical system ever runs at 100%
efficiency; and about the theorem of Clausius, which states that the entropy of an isolated system always continually increases." [87]
(Pessimism)
"His had always been a vigorous, Italian sort of pessimism: like Machiavelli, he allowed the forces of virtù and fortuna
to be about 50/50; but the equations now introduced a random factor which pushed the odds to some unutterable and indeterminable ration
which he found himself afraid to calculate." [87f]
(Anarchy)
"The architectonic purity of her world was constantly threathened by such hints of anarchy: gaps and excrescences and skew lines, and
a shifting or tilting of planes to which she had continually to readjust lest the whole structure shiver into a disarray of discrete and
meaningless signals." [88]
(Entropy/Allegory)
"he found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate metaphor to apply to certain phenomena
in his own world. [..] and in American `consumerism' [he] saw a similar tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation
to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. He found himself, in short, restating Gibb's prediction in social terms, and
envisioned a heat death for his culture in which ideas, like heat energy, would no longer be transferred, since each point in it would
ultimately have the same quantity of energy; and intellectual motion would, accordingly, cease." [88f]
(AI)
"Miriam has been reading science fiction again. That and Scientific American. It seems she is, as we say, bugged at this idea of
computers acting like people. I made the mistake of saying you can just as well turn that around, and talk about human behavior like a
program to be fed into an IBM machine." [90]
(Language Barrier)
"There are Europeans wandering around North Africa these days with their tongues torn out of their heads because those tongues have
spoken the wrong words. Only the Europeans thought they were the right words. [..] Ambiguity. Redundance. Inelevance, even. Leakage. All
this is noise. Noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the circuit." [90f]
(The Bird)
"I held him [..] to give him the warmth of my body. Almost as if I were communicating life to him, or a sense of life. What has happened?
Has the transfer of heat ceased to work? Is there no more...' He did not finish." [88]
(Final Equilibrium)
"[She] realized somehow that the constant 37 was now decisive. [..] and turned to face the man on the bed and wait with him until the
moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering,
curious dominant of their seperate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion." [98]
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