a

. “The more orthodox scientific view is that the entropy of the universe must forever increase to its final maximum value. It has not yet reached this: we should not be thinking about it if it had. It is still increasing rapidly, and so must have had a beginning; there must have been what we may describe as a ‘creation’ at a time not infinitely remote.”  Jeans, p. 181.

b

. “A final point to be made is that the second law of thermodynamics and the principle of increase in entropy have great philosophical implications. The question that arises is how did the universe get into the state of reduced entropy in the first place, since all natural processes known to us tend to increase entropy? ... The author has found that the second law tends to increase his conviction that there is a Creator who has the answer for the future destiny of man and the universe.” Gordon J. Van Wylen, Thermodynamics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959), p. 169.

“The time asymmetry of the Universe is expressed by the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy increases with time as order is transformed into disorder. The mystery is not that an ordered state should become disordered but that the early Universe apparently was in a highly ordered state.” Don N. Page, “Inflation Does Not Explain Time Asymmetry,” Nature, Vol. 304, 7 July 1983, p. 39.

“There is no mechanism known as yet that would allow the Universe to begin in an arbitrary state and then evolve to its present highly-ordered state.”  Ibid., p. 40.

“The real puzzle is why there is an arrow of time at all; that is, why the Universe is not simply a thermodynamic equilibrium at all times (except during the inevitable local fluctuations). The theory of nonequilibrium systems [such as those described by Ilya Prigogine] may tell us how such systems behave, given that there are some; but it does not explain how they come to be so common in the first place (and all oriented in the same temporal direction). This is ‘time’s greatest mystery’, and for all its merits, the theory of nonequilibrium systems does not touch it. What would touch it would be a cosmological demonstration that the Universe was bound to be in a low-entropy state after the Big Bang.” Huw Price, “Past and Future,” Nature, Vol. 348, 22 November 1990, p. 356.