Stephen Hawking bequeathed that the black hole entropy formula that made him famous be inscribed on his gravestone, just as on the tombstone of Ludwig Boltzmann, the Austrian physicist and one of the fathers of statistical mechanics, there was carved as a

Boltzmann's contribution to the laws of classical thermodynamics was so substantial, and so revolutionary for physics and engineering, that it was even proposed to call the nineteenth century the century of Boltzmann. He modestly replied that he would rather it were called the century of Darwin, whose principle of biological evolution, in his opinion, explained the nature of things far better.

It is curious that Darwin's theory is, in physical terms, the exact opposite of Boltzmann's theory of increasing disorder: Darwin postulates a movement of the world's substances from disorder towards ordered, strictly organised living objects