There's a law of physics that governs everything. Your happiness, your depression, and even whether your life has meaning. And guess what? It can't be broken.

Life is a local violation of the law of entropy. It is a counter entropic resistance. The thing that the suicidally depressed people feel is that they don't matter. Others do, they don't. Nothing they can do will ever make them. This is how I judge people. Are you increasing entropy or are you decreasing it? These agents begin to have a longing to matter. If they do this, then what we have are non carbon based humans.

She's a MacArthur genius, a philosopher who's trained in physics, and she just used the second law of thermodynamics to explain while your life feels like it's always falling apart. What Rebecca did next is what no physicist has ever done before. She took the second law of thermodynamics and built an entire theory of human meaning on top of it.

What took you from MacArthur genius, your many, many works of philosophy, and your great contributions to literature from the genius grants, et cetera. To write a book that's basically a stealth physics book.

When I studied physics as an undergraduate, and then I had gone, when I went into philosophy, it was into philosophy of physics. So I've always been interested in physics. When I first learned about the second law of thermodynamics, I couldn't quite conceptualize it. I couldn't quite completely wrap my head around it. But it seemed to have implications for us, right? I mean, we are physical systems. We are subject to the second law of thermodynamics. There's a tragic dimension to this law, and that we live in resistance to it. All living things live in resistance.

In fact, when I was a graduate student, that occurred to me, oh, my gosh, biological systems are really just organized to resist the second law of thermodynamics. I said, this is so exciting. Has anybody discovered this? And then I read Schrodinger's what is Life? Other people had. In fact, Boltzmann himself had realized this at the laws of biology are substance biology's response to this supreme law that tells us that in closed systems entropy never decreases. And if there's any way for it to increase, it will. And what that entropy is, is the measure of the disorder of the system. The disorder is the more disorder, the higher the entropy, the less efficient work you get out of the system. And eventually the system will go to thermal equilibrium.

You'll be able to get no more energy out of it. It's somewhat the end of the system. And in fact, Rudolph Clausius, the 19th century physicist who formulated a concept of entropy, which means literally, transformation from within, there's poignancy in that. It's a transformation from within is going to the end of the system. And he had said, you know, that the universe itself go to thermal equilibrium, to what we call the heat death. And so there'll be no more energy to be gotten out of it. This sounds like a joke from Woody Alley. His mother brings him to a shrink because he's discovered that eventually the sun is going to go out.

He said, you know, how can I live? What's there to live for? You know, the sun is going to go out. And the mother says to the shrink, you know, I don't know why Alfie is so worried about it. It's not going out over Brooklyn.

It's in Annie hall, right?

Annie Hall. Yes, that's right. What do you care?

Brooklyn's not expanding, right?

Y that's what it was. It was expanding, right? That's right.

Classic. You studied physics as an undergraduate and you write in the book how you've been haunted since your early days as an undergrad by the second law of thermodynamics. So let's start with that story that you tell first about Ludwig Boltzmann, who solved one of the great paradoxes of physics, the irreversibility paradox. Talk about that. And then why did, in your mind, was he so traumatized, perhaps, or full of dread of his equation that he took his own life? So talk about that.