In fact, if we really want to take modern physics seriously, we should go further. We have traditionally thought of a world that works by cause and effect as a fundamental assumption of science, even as a presupposition of rational thought. But in modern physics, ordinary causality breaks down in the microscopic realm. Not only do we have events that happen at random, there is no distinction between forward and backward directions in time. Our familiar, macroscopic sense of cause and effect is, like the arrow of time, not something basic to the world. These both emerge in our macroscopic environment, out of a microscopic substrate that is radically different.