The Elegant Universe

by Brian Greene

A proton consists of two up-quarks and a down-quark; a neutron consists of two down-quarks and an up-quark.

The universe—being composed of an enormous number of these vibrating strings—is akin to a cosmic symphony.

Entropy is a measure of disorder or randomness.

Everything tends toward

greater disorder. Even if you clean your cluttered desk, decreasing its entropy, the total entropy, including that of your body and the air in the room, actually increases. You see, to clean your desk you have to expend energy; you have to disrupt some of the orderly molecules of fat in your body to create this energy for your muscles, and as you clean, your body gives off heat, which jostles the surrounding air molecules into a higher state of agitation and disorder. When all of these effects are accounted for, they more than compensate for your desk's decrease in entropy, and thus the total entropy increases.

Quantum determinism tells us that the probability that any particular event will

occur at some chosen time in the future is fully determined by knowledge of the wave functions at any prior time.