Searching For The Science Behind Reincarnation

[Silent3]

263. What Einstein is quoted as saying here is just a rephrasing of the first law...

...of thermodynamics, which is about conservation of energy.

The second law is about entropy, about how order tends toward disorder. Order, unlike energy, is not conserved.

Whether anyone was "hoping" for anything or not, to bring up how energy doesn't go away, just changes form, in a thread about reincarnation certainly strongly suggests (and I've many, many times seem this idea expressly stated, not just hinted at) that someone is implying that our minds or our "souls" are "energy", and that it's somehow a scientific view of reincarnation to think of our "energy" surviving and taking form in a new life.

When energy changes form, however, it becomes a "lower" form of energy, that is, more diffuse, less capable of performing work (a portion of transformed energy can increase in quality, but only at the expense of further lowering the quality of the remaining portion). To the extent we can try to see ourselves as "energy", it's the order of that energy that's important -- the complex and delicate patterns that describe our thoughts and memories -- not the mere quantity of that energy.

If you're satisfied that your "reincarnation" consists of a few of your molecules later being used by dogs and daisies, and making the planet and the space around it some nearly infinitesimally amount warmer, what Einstein said applies. If you're talking about people being born and supposedly remembering past lives, what Einstein said is no justification for believing such things possible.