Science Quote by Michael Polanyi

Entropy doesn’t just “fall out” of the landscape; Polanyi is insisting that we smuggle in a way of seeing before we can claim we’ve discovered a law. His example is doing double duty: it’s a technical point about physics and a philosophical ambush aimed at the myth of fully objective science. You can map every contour of a “topography” of microstates and still not get entropy until you add an extra rule about how to treat those states: that they’re effectively random, that we should count them in a particular way, that we should ignore fine-grained correlations. Entropy is a principle of interpretation as much as a measured property.

The subtext is Polanyi’s lifelong argument against the idea that scientific knowledge is purely explicit and mechanical. Scientists rely on tacit commitments - about what counts as noise, what counts as a relevant variable, what kinds of regularities are “real” - and those commitments aren’t derivable from the data alone. Randomness here is less a fact than a stance: a decision to treat complexity as statistically featureless so that a higher-level order can be stated.

Context matters: writing in the shadow of mid-century positivism and the prestige of formal systems, Polanyi pushes back on the dream that method can replace judgment. The rhetorical move is surgical. By choosing entropy - a cornerstone concept often presented as inevitable - he exposes how even our most “hard” principles are scaffolded by auxiliary assumptions. Science advances not by escaping interpretation, but by making the right interpretive wager at the right time.