“The great nineteenth-century statistical physicists James Maxwell in the United Kingdom, Ludwig Boltzmann in Austria, and Willard Gibbs in the United States derived the fundamental formulas of what would go on to be called "information theory," and used them to characterize the behavior of atoms. In particular, they applied these formulas in order to derive justification for the second law of thermodynamics. As noted, the first law of thermodynamics is a statement about ‘energy’: energy is conserved when it is transformed from mechanical energy to heat. The second law of thermodynamics, however, is a statement about ‘information’, and about how it is processed at the microscopic scale. The law states that entropy (which is a measure of information) tends to increase. More precisely, it states that each physical system contains a certain number of bits of information—both invisible information (or entropy) and visible information—and that the physical dynamics that process and transform that information never decrease that total number of bits.”

— Seth Lloyd (2016), Programming the Universe (§:Information and Physical Systems, pgs. 163-164) [4]

“There is a general tendency in the universe, in human societies, and actually everywhere, for entropy AND information to increase.”

— Seth Lloyd (2018), “The Black Hole of Finance” [6]

“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.”

— Seth Lloyd (2004), “Article”, Nature; quote possibly stylized on Morton Tavel (2002) [2]