Relating the YW books to science

[EricG1793]

This may have been mentioned elsewhere, but my Science book for this year defines Entropy as "A measure of how spread out, or dispersed energy is."

So does this mean that the more entropy there is, the more spread out energy is, and dark energy ("Energy that might be causing accelerated expansion of the universe") takes the place of the space left over from the energy? Or would this scenario be dark matter ("Unseen mass that adds to the gravity of a galaxy, but cannot be detected or seen")?

[Taran]

Entropy is the tendency for disorder to increase. Not the same as chaos.

The dictionary on my Mac (Oxford American) defines entropy as:

-- noun Physics: a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system (symbol: S)
-- figurative: lack of order or predictability: gradual decline into disorder
-- in information theory: a logarithmic measure of the rate of transfer of information in a particular message or language
...
-- origin: mid 19th century: from En- [inside] + Greek trope̅ 'transformation'

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Perhaps at the scale of the big bang everything is moving away from everything else and eventually all there will be is very sparse dust, too sparse to support life.

But nature--organic and inorganic--also generates complex patterns that seem random but are not. The wisdom to detect those patterns and interact with them seems like magic when you first learn about it. See, for example:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/fractals/program.html

Dark matter is observed at a large scale as an explanation for patterns in celestial movement. Whether dark matter is a force for disorder or a different kind of order depends on how you look at it.

I think that we fight entropy and try to create and preserve meaningful patterns, including our own organic life forms, in the short run, and to reproduce them in the medium run. But it does not seem to me that there always needs to be life in the universe for life today to have meaning.

The wizards and others in the SYWTBAW series fight to preserve life against a Lone Power bent on tricking beings into accepting death. I think that's a metaphor or symbol of what happens in individual lives and communities--we continue creating and growing, or we adopt some restricted, addictive, soul-denying pattern and die. But I don't think what happens at the largest scale in the universe need reflect that same battle.

The large does reflect the small in Diane's books--the struggle for meaning is projected onto the whole universe. That view is not the only way to see things and honor life. That is, if the struggle for meaning is immanent in the universe at a large scale, the large scale need not follow the same patterns that apply on the smaller scales we live at.

IMO, the universe could die and be reborn without destroying the meaning of our lives. If you believe in a deity or an afterlife, then that meaning won't be forgotten. Even if you don't, the meaning we create now matters for us and all who share in it.