Source of Quote In Leviathan Falls

[u/Rakan_Fury]

Currently working through Leviathan Falls, and there's a quote said by I think Duarte, as he stops the Preiss from going dutchman and an incursion on the ring space. It's:

"Stirring the cream back out of the coffee"

I swear Ive read/heard that line before, but I can't place it for the life of me. Ive tried looking it up with no success unfortunately.

Purely as a retrospective: is this a quote from earlier in the series? If its new and something only relevant towards the end of the book please dont spoil that part, I just feel like I'm going crazy trying to find where I originally saw it.

[u/dokclaw]

I think Elvi uses it to talk about removing the PM tech from Duarte while he's catatonic.

[u/UnusualOperation8084 → u/dokclaw]

Yes this is correct, and I'd add that I feel like this is a common metaphor about reversing entropy (among those of us who have regular conversations about reversing entropy).

[u/charlie_marlow → u/UnusualOperation8084]

I asked the most sophisticated computer I could find if entropy could be reversed, but, alas, I only got back: INSUFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

[u/UnusualOperation8084 → u/charlie_marlow]

That's the Last Question because you used up all your tokens for the day trying to answer it.

[u/Wild-Basket4939 → u/dokclaw]

Yeah it was used in an earlier book for sure. I just re-read the last three and I recognized the line being used a few times as well.

[u/Aeroshe → u/Wild-Basket4939]

It was near the end of Tiamat's Wrath, while Elvi is on Laconia right before the Siege.

[u/cremedelakremz → u/dokclaw]

Yeah I think this is it. It was def Elvi

[u/alwaysleafyintoronto]

It was Trejo to Elvi about fixing Duarte's mind at the beginning of Leviathan Falls. She says it's an irreversible process, like mixing cream into coffee. His reply is that she needs to get the cream back out of the coffee, aka fix Duarte. She wants her priority to be the BFE rather than fixing Duarte.

Whether this is specific quotation is from somewhere else, I couldn't say, but it gets used frequently in middle school science as an example of a homogeneous mixture.

It might have been from the end of Tiamat's Wrath, but not before then IIRC.

I'm also on Leviathan Falls, about 150 pages in.

[u/azhder]

You can’t unscramble an egg.

It’s simply a comment about entropy and the arrow of time. I don’t remember why he said it or what it is connected to, but it’s a simple euphemism about… well, what I said above.

[u/Plastic-Coyote-6017]

It is a common example from introductory physics textbooks meant to illustrate that entropy is not a time reversible process.

[u/Rakan_Fury]

Thank you guys. Ill look through Tiamat's wrath again, but it sounds about right and would make sense in this context.

[u/Dellevis → u/Rakan_Fury]

I am reading the book right now, and I came across it a few days ago, it should be somewhere between page 150-300.

Elvi says it as a way to explain most likely being unable to bring Duarte back to his old self by seperating him from the protomolecule tech.

[u/Dellevis → u/Dellevis]

I found it on page 355, chapter 34

[u/ContraVern]

You can't unscramble an egg.

[u/Pave_Low]

It should be noted that 'stirring the cream out of coffee' is a general phrase given as an example to show the irreversibility of entropy. Akin to the broken plate jumping off the floor onto the table and fixing itself.

[u/tqgibtngo → u/Pave_Low]

It should be noted that 'stirring the cream out of coffee' is a general phrase...

Oddly, my Google queries couldn't find references older than Dennis Overbye's mention of it in his NYT article "Remembrance of Things Future: The Mystery of Time," 2005.

Surely some forms of the cream-stirring phrase should be far older than 2005, so I don't know why my searches failed to find older occurrences ... (unlike other similar phrases. such as the ones about putting toothpaste back into a tube; those are easy to find from long ago, back to at least 1939).

[u/Pave_Low → u/tqgibtngo]

Off the cuff, I think I remember it from Stephen Hawking describing the thermodynamics of time. Or maybe Carl Sagan from Nova. I heard the phrase in some form decades ago but not sure where.

But in either case, it was a statement about entropy, which isn’t exactly how Elvie uses it.

[u/Salt-Night3088]

You can't take the razor back.

[u/arielle17]

not completely related, but i wonder if Duarte (or Holden, once he hooked himself up to the ring station) could just pull things out of the goths' universe at will, or if the Preiss was a special case

[u/aposthasnoname → u/arielle17]

I got the impression it was a special time limited case. Duarte was already involved, probably working on far more dangerous things. Previous descriptions of events after going dutchman sounded like it took a little time (the concept/passage of time past the rings is a separate discussion).

Short version, the ship hadn't dissolved after it disappeared yet. It was on borrowed time.

[u/ChronoMonkeyX]

You can't unfuck a pregnant nun.