The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity

Think of it this way: there are many more ways for your room to be a complete mess (disordered) than there are ways of being neatly organized.

Useful energy is called “free energy” and useless energy is called “entropy.”

Structures like cyclones and vortices don’t emerge in spite of the universe’s tendency to become more entropic; they form because of it.

Dissipation-driven self-organization can look like magic, but it requires no supernatural force to proceed. It is thermodynamic in origin, Darwinian in nature, and mathematically describable.

states of higher entropy have more microstates that all correspond to a single macrostate.

Shannon entropy or information entropy, and it is a measure of the ignorance, or uncertainty, one has before decoding an encrypted message.

we could rewind the tape of time and play it again with even the slightest change, it’s unlikely that life would have emerged on our planet, or for that matter, in the entire universe.

a series of linked reactions that establish a positive feedback loop.

far-from-equilibrium phase transitions can be predicted in a probabilistic sense using the emerging mathematical tools of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics,