Chapter 13             The Morally Crucial Features Of Modern Physics               Part A 

         At last. We are ready to tackle the moral challenge. The question now is: What are the characteristics of the real universe, according to our best scientific understanding of it, that bear on how we should design our new moral code? The answer is: The two most morally crucial characteristics of the modern scientific worldview are quantum uncertainty and entropy. Each of these needs a bit more elaboration in order for us to see, first, how it affects human lives materially and, second, what its significance is morally.

                      

 The first morally relevant feature of reality, quantum uncertainty, requires that humans, individually and in society, survive by learning to calculate probabilities of future events. These probabilities range from the likelihood that it is going to rain this afternoon, to the likelihood that I'll get a stomach ache if I eat these fried onions, to the likelihood that a leopard is hiding in that field of grass ahead, to the likelihood that a war will come if we tell the tribe that regularly cross our rope bridge that they can't use it anymore, to the likelihood that Germany will attack Russia, given Hitler's words in "Mein Kampf" about Germany's need for living space to the east. We live by odds-making.

The second morally relevant feature of reality is stated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it is more familiar to us and far easier to explain than quantum uncertainty. This law tells us that energy always flows downhill, from areas of greater concentration to areas of lesser concentration. If matter and energy are getting more concentrated or organized in one area of space, that only means that an even greater amount energy is being borrowed from areas nearby. Our lives are always hard. 

An area of matter-energy organization and concentration (like the biosphere of our planet or the mass of my body) must always be maintained at the expense of even greater rates of energy dissipation in nearby spaces. I get energy by eating plants or animals - which also depend ultimately on eating plants - and plants get their energy from the sun as it burns. Fossil fuels when they are burned are also only releasing stored solar energy, as are hydro-electric dams and wood pellets. The sun is our source, and it burns and dissipates energy much more intensely than the creatures in the biosphere of the Earth build up and store second-hand solar energy.

           

                                                  dying star at edge of universe

                                                     (13 billion light years away)

Stars are burning out. The universe is heading toward a final state in which more than 10 to the 79^th instances of some kind of elemental particle will be spread uniformly across it at a temperature of absolute zero. We really don't understand numbers that big, but that doesn't matter. The heat death of the universe, as far as our science can tell, is inevitable. The heat death of the universe isn't due for at least another five billion years or so, but the effect of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is seen every day in the way that things keep falling apart; rust and decay are built into the fabric of daily life.

            To humans, who are complex, energy-concentrated, subtly organized, living entities, this means that we, like all living things, must live against the natural flow of the physical universe. The level of “disorganizedness” or “burnt-outness” of any object or area of space (including the universe) is called its “entropy”, and the overall entropy of the universe must always be increasing. 

          

            Thus, our present worldview, with what it is telling us of entropy and quantum mechanics, is much more generally telling us, in terms relevant to human experience, that the universe is governed by what we recognize as two main principles: adversity and uncertainty. The sense we have that adversity is inherent in life is our most profound way of charactering the entropy of reality. The sense we have that uncertainty is inherent in life is our most profound way of characterizing the quantum mechanical nature of reality.