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Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe Kindle Edition
by Brian Greene (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 3,041 ratings
4.0 on Goodreads
5,214 ratings
From the world-renowned physicist and bestselling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, a captivating exploration of deep time and humanity's search for purpose
In both time and space, the cosmos is astoundingly vast, and yet is governed by simple, elegant, universal mathematical laws.
On this cosmic timeline, our human era is spectacular but fleeting. Someday, we know, we will all die. And, we know, so too will the universe itself.
Until the End of Time is Brian Greene's breathtaking new exploration of the cosmos and our quest to understand it. Greene takes us on a journey across time, from our most refined understanding of the universe's beginning, to the closest science can take us to the very end. He explores how life and mind emerged from the initial chaos, and how our minds, in coming to understand their own impermanence, seek in different ways to give meaning to experience: in story, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and our longing for the timeless, or eternal. Through a series of nested stories that explain distinct but interwoven layers of reality-from the quantum mechanics to consciousness to black holes-Greene provides us with a clearer sense of how we came to be, a finer picture of where we are now, and a firmer understanding of where we are headed.
Yet all this understanding, which arose with the emergence of life, will dissolve with its conclusion. Which leaves us with one realization: during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the charge of finding our own meaning.
Let us embark.
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Print length
433 pages
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Editors' pick: It takes a storyteller to explain the sciences, and few are as gifted as Brian Greene."—Chris Schluep, Amazon Editor
Review
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
“A splendid and invigorating read . . . [Greene] fans out the fabric of our present understanding, deftly untangling then interweaving the science of everything from black holes to quanta to DNA, tracing how matter made mind made imagination, probing the pull of eternity and storytelling and the sublime.”
—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
“Until the End of Time is encyclopedic in its ambition and its erudition, often heartbreaking . . . A love letter to the ephemeral cosmic moment when everything is possible.”
—Dennis Overbye, The New York Times Book Review
“Ambitious and utterly readable . . . [Greene] weaves personal stories, scientific ideas, concepts and facts into a delightful tapestry . . . What is remarkable about Mr. Greene’s book is how he has delved into deep questions that not only have no simple answers but may never be settled at all.”
—Priyamvada Natarajan, The Wall Street Journal
"[Greene] says it all with such ebullience, such ingenuous enthusiasm, that if he told you the whole cold, amoral universe was ending tomorrow you'd roll with it the way he would—as just one more dramatic chapter in an extraordinary tale in which we all have a precious if fleeting role." —Time
"A cracking read. . . . The origins of matter, life and consciousness, and their grisly fate, are laid out here with elegant clarity. If you want to know how everything got here and where it's going, read this book." —The Sunday Times (London)
"Marvelous. . . . [Greene's] prose style is one that any novelist would envy. . . . [He] traces a tremendous arc through pretty well everything: a thrilling venture, at once frightening and consolatory." —The Irish Times
"Greene writes beautifully." —The Courier-Mail (Brisbane)
“There’s tremendous joy in witnessing a brilliant and curious mind wrestle with such profound issues. [Greene] takes readers on a remarkable journey.”
—John Keogh, Booklist
“Packed with ideas . . . There is an echo of philosopher Henry David Thoreau in Greene’s account of lying out at night, enraptured by the aurora borealis. And essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s declaration that the “sublime laws play indifferently through atoms and galaxies” could almost be this book’s epigraph. Such qualities lift this work above many accounts of the cosmic story.”
—Philip Ball, Nature
“[Greene] weaves a rich tapestry of theories and perspectives as he navigates space and time . . . Of course, Until the End of Time can’t provide all the answers. But you would be hard-pressed to find another book that seeks to do so with the same clarity and meaning.”
—Gege Li, New Scientist
"Brian Greene is a master at elucidating the laws of physics." —Journal Inquirer (Connecticut)
"As well as offering lucid, detailed accouns of the science behind the big bang, the development ofthe cosmos, the emergence of life and human conscoiusness, and the inevitable exeinction of the cosmos, Greene's treatise is motivated by a personal search for equanimity." —The Guardian
"Mind-bending" —GeekWire
"Sentence by sentence, Greene is such a wonderful teacher. . . . When the current hour gets overhwleming . . . it's a joy to sweep back and forth through the eons. You remember how infinitesimal this moment actually is, and that every second we get to be alive on this planet is an utter gift." —Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See
"Greene is an elegant, eloquent writer . . . beautifully written. . . . An energizing, fascinating exploration of origins and endings." —The Providence Journal
“Accessible and illuminating . . . Curious readers . . . will be richly rewarded by [Greene's] fascinating exploration.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Engaging . . . An insightful history of everything that simplifies its complex subject as much as possible but no further.”
—Kirkus
About the Author
BRIAN GREENE is a professor of physics and mathematics and director of Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Physics and is renowned for his groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory. He is the author of The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Hidden Reality, which have collectively spent sixty-five weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and sold more than two million copies worldwide, and he has hosted two Peabody and Emmy Award winning NOVA miniseries based on his books. With producer Tracy Day, Greene cofounded the World Science Festival. He lives in New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
The Lure of Eternity
Beginnings, Endings, and Beyond
In the fullness of time all that lives will die. For more than three billion years, as species simple and complex found their place in earth’s hierarchy, the scythe of death has cast a persistent shadow over the flowering of life. Diversity spread as life crawled from the oceans, strode on land, and took flight in the skies. But wait long enough and the ledger of birth and death, with entries more numerous than stars in the galaxy, will balance with dispassionate precision. The unfolding of any given life is beyond prediction. The final fate of any given life is a foregone conclusion.
And yet this looming end, as inevitable as the setting sun, is something only we humans seem to notice. Long before our arrival, the thunderous clap of storm clouds, the raging might of volcanoes, the tremulous shudders of a quaking earth surely sent scurrying everything with the power to scurry. But such flights are an instinctual reaction to a present danger. Most life lives in the moment, with fear born of immediate perception. It is only you and I and the rest of our lot that can reflect on the distant past, imagine the future, and grasp the darkness that awaits.
It’s terrifying. Not the kind of terror that makes us flinch or run for cover. Rather, it’s a foreboding that quietly lives within us, one we learn to tamp down, to accept, to make light of. But underneath the obscuring layers is the ever-present, unsettling fact of what lies in store, knowledge that William James described as the “worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight.”1 To work and play, to yearn and strive, to long and love, all of it stitching us ever more tightly into the tapestry of the lives we share, and for it all then to be gone—well, to paraphrase Steven Wright, it’s enough to scare you half to death. Twice.
Of course, most of us, in the service of sanity, don’t fixate on the end. We go about the world focused on worldly concerns. We accept the inevitable and direct our energies to other things. Yet the recognition that our time is finite is always with us, helping to shape the choices we make, the challenges we accept, the paths we follow. As cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker maintained, we are under a constant existential tension, pulled toward the sky by a consciousness that can soar to the heights of da Vinci, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Einstein but tethered to earth by a physical form that will decay to dust. “Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”2 According to Becker, we are impelled by such awareness to deny death the capacity to erase us. Some soothe the existential yearning through commitment to family, a team, a movement, a religion, a nation—constructs that will outlast the individual’s allotted time on earth. Others leave behind creative expressions, artifacts that extend the duration of their presence symbolically. “We fly to Beauty,” said Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.”3 Others still seek to vanquish death by winning or conquering, as if stature, power, and wealth command an immunity unavailable to the common mortal.
Across the millennia, one consequence has been a widespread fascination with all things, real or imagined, that touch on the timeless. From prophesies of an afterlife, to teachings of reincarnation, to entreaties of the windswept mandala, we have developed strategies to contend with knowledge of our impermanence and, often with hope, sometimes with resignation, to gesture toward eternity. What’s new in our age is the remarkable power of science to tell a lucid story not only of the past, back to the big bang, but also of the future. Eternity itself may forever lie beyond the reach of our equations, but our analyses have already revealed that the universe we have come to know is transitory. From planets to stars, solar systems to galaxies, black holes to swirling nebulae, nothing is everlasting. Indeed, as far as we can tell, not only is each individual life finite, but so too is life itself. Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment.
Still, here on earth we have punctuated our moment with astonishing feats of insight, creativity, and ingenuity as each generation has built on the achievements of those who have gone before, seeking clarity on how it all came to be, pursuing coherence in where it is all going, and longing for an answer to why it all matters.
Such is the story of this book.
Stories of Nearly Everything
We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill. The plural—narratives—is utterly essential. In the library of human reflection, there is no single, unified volume that conveys ultimate understanding. Instead, we have written many nested stories that probe different domains of human inquiry and experience: stories, that is, that parse the patterns of reality using different grammars and vocabularies. Protons, neutrons, electrons, and nature’s other particles are essential for telling the reductionist story, analyzing the stuff of reality, from planets to Picasso, in terms of their microphysical constituents. Metabolism, replication, mutation, and adaptation are essential for telling the story of life’s emergence and development, analyzing the biochemical workings of remarkable molecules and the cells they govern. Neurons, information, thought, and awareness are essential for the story of mind—and with that the narratives proliferate: myth to religion, literature to philosophy, art to music, telling of humankind’s struggle for survival, will to understand, urge for expression, and search for meaning.
These are all ongoing stories, developed by thinkers hailing from a great range of distinct disciplines. Understandably so. A saga that ranges from quarks to consciousness is a hefty chronicle. Still, the different stories are interlaced. Don Quixote speaks to humankind’s yearning for the heroic, told through the fragile Alonso Quijano, a character created in the imagination of Miguel de Cervantes, a living, breathing, thinking, sensing, feeling collection of bone, tissue, and cells that, during his lifetime, supported organic processes of energy transformation and waste excretion, which themselves relied on atomic and molecular movements honed by billions of years of evolution on a planet forged from the detritus of supernova explosions scattered throughout a realm of space emerging from the big bang. Yet to read Don Quixote’s travails is to gain an understanding of human nature that would remain opaque if embedded in a description of the movements of the knight-errant’s molecules and atoms or conveyed through an elaboration of the neuronal processes crackling in Cervantes’s mind while writing the novel. Connected though they surely are, different stories, told with different languages and focused on different levels of reality, provide vastly different insights.
Perhaps one day we will be able to transit seamlessly between these stories, connecting all products of the human mind, real and fictive, scientific and imaginative. Perhaps we will one day invoke a unified theory of particulate ingredients to explain the overwhelming vision of a Rodin and the myriad responses The Burghers of Calais elicits from those who experience it. Maybe we will fully grasp how the seemingly mundane, a glint of light reflecting from a spinning dinner plate, can churn through the powerful mind of a Richard Feynman and compel him to rewrite the fundamental laws of physics. More ambitious still, perhaps one day we will understand the workings of mind and matter so completely that all will be laid bare, from black holes to Beethoven, from quantum weirdness to Walt Whitman. But even without having anything remotely near that capacity, there is much to be gained by immersion in these stories—scientific, creative, imaginative—appreciating when and how they emerged from earlier ones playing out on the cosmic timeline and tracing the developments, both controversial and conclusive, that elevated each to their place of explanatory prominence.4
Clear across the collection of stories, we will find two forces sharing the role of leading character. In chapter 2 we will meet the first: entropy. Although familiar to many through its association with disorder and the often-quoted declaration that disorder is always on the rise, entropy has subtle qualities that allow physical systems to develop in a rich variety of ways, sometimes even appearing to swim against the entropic stream. We will see important examples of this in chapter 3, as particles in the aftermath of the big bang seemingly flout the drive to disorder as they evolve into organized structures like stars, galaxies, and planets—and ultimately, into configurations of matter that surge with the current of life. Asking how that current switched on takes us to the second of our pervasive influences: evolution.
Although it is the prime mover behind the gradual transformations experienced by living systems, evolution by natural selection kicks in well before the first forms of life start competing. In chapter 4, we will encounter molecules battling molecules, struggles for survival waged in an arena of inanimate matter. Round upon round of molecular Darwinism, as such chemical combat is called, is what likely produced a series of ever more robust configurations ultimately yielding the first molecular collections we would recognize as life. The details are the stuff of cutting-edge research, but with the last couple of decades of stupendous progress, the consensus is that we are heading down the right track. Indeed, it may be that the dual forces of entropy and evolution are well-matched partners in the trek toward the emergence of life. While that might sound like an odd coupling—entropy’s public rap veers close to chaos, seemingly the antithesis of evolution or of life—recent mathematical analyses of entropy suggest that life, or at least lifelike qualities, might well be the expected product of a long-lived source of energy, like the sun, relentlessly raining down heat and light on molecular ingredients that are competing for the limited resources available on a planet like earth.
Tentative though some of these ideas currently are, what’s certain is that a billion or so years after the earth formed it was teeming with life developing under evolutionary pressure, and so the next phase of developments is standard Darwinian fare. Chance events, like being hit by a cosmic ray or suffering a molecular mishap during the replication of DNA, result in random mutations, some with minimal impact on the organism’s health or welfare but others making it more or less fit in the competition for survival. Those mutations that enhance fitness are more likely to be passed on to descendants because the very meaning of “more fit” is that the trait’s carrier is more likely to survive to reproductive maturity and produce fit offspring. From generation to generation, qualities that enhanced fitness thus spread widely.
Billions of years later, as this long process continued to unfold, a particular suite of mutations provided some forms of life with an enhanced capacity for cognition. Some life not only became aware, but became aware of being aware. That is, some life acquired conscious self-awareness. Such self-reflective beings have naturally wondered what consciousness is and how it arose: How can a swirl of mindless matter think and feel? Various researchers, as we will discuss in chapter 5, anticipate a mechanistic explanation. They argue that we need to understand the brain—its components, its functions, its connections—with far greater fidelity than we now do, but once we have that knowledge, an explanation of consciousness will follow. Others anticipate that we are up against a far greater challenge, arguing that consciousness is the most difficult conundrum we have ever encountered, one that will require radically new perspectives regarding not just mind but also the very nature of reality.
Opinions converge when assessing the impact our cognitive sophistication has had on our behavioral repertoire. Across tens of thousands of generations during the Pleistocene, our forebears joined together in groups that subsisted through hunting and gathering. In time, an emerging mental dexterity provided them with refined capacities to plan and organize and communicate and teach and evaluate and judge and problem-solve. Leveraging these enhanced abilities of the individual, groups exerted increasingly influential communal forces. Which takes us to the next collection of explanatory episodes, those focused on developments that made us. In chapter 6 we examine our acquisition of language and subsequent obsession with the telling of stories; chapter 7 probes a particular genre of stories, those that foreshadow and transition into religious traditions; and in chapter 8 we explore the long-standing and widespread pursuit of creative expression.
In seeking the origin of these developments, both common and sacred, researchers have invoked a wide range of explanations. For us, an essential guiding light will continue to be Darwinian evolution, applied now to human behavior. The brain, after all, is but another biological structure evolving via selection pressures, and it is the brain that informs what we do and how we respond. Over the past few decades, cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists have developed this perspective, establishing that much as our biology has been shaped by the forces of Darwinian selection, so too has our behavior. And thus in our trek across human culture we will often ask whether this or that behavior may have enhanced the prospects for survival and reproduction among those who long ago practiced it, promoting its wide propagation throughout generations of descendants. However, unlike the opposable thumb or upright gait—inherited physiological features tightly linked to specific adaptive behaviors—many of the brain’s inherited characteristics mold predilections rather than definitive actions. We are influenced by these predispositions but human activity emerges from a comingling of behavioral tendencies with our complex, deliberative, self-reflective minds.
And so a second guiding light, distinct but no less important, will be trained on the inner life that comes hand in hand with our refined cognitive capacities. Following a trail marked by many thinkers, we will come to a revealing vista: with human cognition we surely harnessed a powerful force, one that in time elevated us to the dominant species worldwide. But the very mental faculties that allow us to shape and mold and innovate are the very ones that dispel the myopia that would otherwise keep us narrowly focused on the present. The ability to manipulate the environment thoughtfully provides the capacity to shift our vantage point, to hover above the timeline and contemplate what was and imagine what will be. However much we’d prefer it otherwise, to achieve “I think, therefore I am” is to run headlong into the rejoinder “I am, therefore I will die.”
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ASIN : B07X57Z3BQ
Publisher : Penguin (February 18, 2020)
From the United States
jim johnson`
5.0 out of 5 stars The grandest ofvision
Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2020
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I have read all of Brian Greene’s books but found this one the most interesting because it addresses the purpose of life in the universe on the grandest of all scales. It obviously deserves a five star rating. Greene’s unbiased analytical approach to controversial issues is appreciated.
I especially enjoyed chapters 3, 4, and 5 where Greene describes the big band in a unique ways and addresses consciousness. For example: “After all, the more finally you examine something that’s alive, the more challenging it is to see that it’s living.” (Page 69); “The two ends of a water molecule act like charged claws that pull apart … this arrangement makes it an uncanny solvent.” (Page 85); “Electrons jump from one molecular receptor to another with each receptor more electron crazy than the previous, ensuring that each jump results in the release of energy.” (Page 92); “How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless emotionless particles come together and yield inner sensations of color or sound, of elation or wonder, of confusion or surprise? (Page 124); and, “This question has inspired more pages in the philosophical ligature than just about any other conundrum.” (Page 146)
However, the following suggestions would have helped clarify the message: one, since opposing views were presented, a chapter summary specifically listing the author’s conclusions would have been helpful; second, the 102 story empire state building analogy was clever but a chart with the key dates would have provided clarity.
I also wondered about gaps in the coverage. For example, verbal communication was emphasized with no focus on books (written language) as the key to advancement of the human race. Another example was when discussing why 75% of population follow a religious faith. A big reason may be the “instruction” children receive during their impressionable years. And, finally would superconductivity change the conclusion of a thinking machine dissipating heat?
Two additional comments. If the cyclic model of the universe (rather than inflation) is correct, the doomsday scenario will not happen, and the story has a different ending. And second, the existing forces, fields and initial conditions must be fine-tuned for life and consciousness to result, external inflation implies a multiverse as the explanation; however, a “design” is an equally valid argument.
In brief, some of the key conclusions are: immortality is fraught with issues; nothing is permanent in the long term because of expanding space; and because the universe has no purpose, man must define his own purpose.
In closing, the following quotes from the final chapter explain Greene’s analysis:
“Particles and fields do what they do without concern for meaning or value or significance. Even when their indifferent mathematical progression yields life, physical laws maintain complete control. Life has no capacity to intercede or overrule the laws.”
“Longevity varies widely. Yet the fact that we will all die, and the fact that the human species will die, and the fact that life and mind, at least in this universe, are virtually certain to die are expected, run-of-the mill, long-term outcomes of physical law.”
“I used to imagine that by studying the universe, by peeling it apart figuratively and literally, we could answer enough of the how questions to catch a glimpse of the whys. But the more we learn, the more the stance seems to face in the wrong direction. Looking for the universe to hug us, its transient conscious squatters, is understandable, but that’s just not what the universe does.”
“There is no final answer hovering in the depts. Of space awaiting discovery. Instead, certain collections of particles can think and feel and reflect, and within these subjective worlds they can create purpose. And so, in our quest to fathom the human condition, the only direction to look is inward. That is the noble direction to look. It is the direction that forgoes ready-made answers and turns to the highly personal journey of constructing our own meaning.”
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Joseph J. Truncale
5.0 out of 5 stars An academic study of
Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2023
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As someone well into their senior years my reading passions have spanned the topics from A to Z and from the scientific to the esoteric. Several years ago, I had read “The Elegant Universe” and enjoyed the book.
This is why when I saw this 430-page hardcover edition (Until the end of time: Matter and our search for meaning in an evolving universe by Brian Greene) on Amazon I decided to purchase it.
First off, you should be aware that this is not what you would call “a recreational read.” The author is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and in this volume, he explores some heavy scientific and intellectual topics.
Even though he writes beautifully and makes his ideas come alive; nevertheless, this book reads like a college level textbook on physics and cosmology. In fact, there are 99 pages of detailed notes at the end of the book if you decide to do more research on the topics.
The subjects covered in this huge book covers “The lure of eternity, the language of time, origins and entropy, information and vitality, particles and consciousness, language and story, brains and belief, instinct and creativity, duration and impermanence, the twilight of time and the nobility of being.”
In conclusion, I enjoyed reading this book very much and recommend it to those who may have read his best seller (The elegant universe).
Rating: 5 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Tactical principles of the most effective Combative Systems).
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G. C. Carter
4.0 out of 5 stars Nice balance between personal stories, religion, science, the universe and our role in it
Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2020
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I enjoyed: “Until the End of Time …” and recommend that you purchase and read it. Greene’s book will be especially enjoyed by those interested in the universe and our role in it and for readers with some technical training; but, I must share though my opinion that if the author were half as smart and the book half as long it would have been twice as good. For the most part he strikes a nice balance between personal stories, religion and a physics-based, understanding of the universe; it is for the most part very understandable and entertaining to read; there are some dry parts however. There is great intellectual depth, reference to well-known scientific terms… scholars… and their work and a plethora of end notes. To the author’s credit but to the detriment of the reader, the author clearly explains one point of view and the evidence supporting it but then the author presents another point of view with evidence and then yet another. Academic points were explained in a way understandable to most readers such that they would be drawn to read this book. He discusses the traditional view of the big bang that many scientists now belief was the start of the universe and juxtaposes that view with another newer alternative view… that it will oscillate between very small and very large and back again for an infinite duration. Some will find this fascinating; others too theoretical.
Illustrative of the substance and style of the author, Greene writes: “Across cultures and through the ages, we have placed significant value on permanence. The ways we have done so are abundant: some seek absolute truth, others strive for enduring legacies, some build formidable monuments, others pursue immutable laws, and others still turn with fervor toward one or another version of the everlasting… Eternity, as these preoccupations demonstrate, has a powerful pull on the mind aware that its material duration is limited… We emerge from laws that, as far as we can tell, are timeless, and yet we exist for the briefest moment of time. We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws that seem not to require an underlying rationale, and yet we persistently seek meaning and purpose.”
Greene writes: “what’s certain is that a billion or so years after the earth formed it was teeming with life developing under evolutionary pressure, and so the next phase of developments is standard Darwinian fare. Chance events, like being hit by a cosmic ray or suffering a molecular mishap during the replication of DNA, result in random mutations, some with minimal impact on the organism’s health or welfare but others making it more or less fit in the competition for survival. Those mutations that enhance fitness are more likely to be passed on to descendants… From generation to generation, qualities that enhanced fitness thus spread widely.”
Green writes: ” Over the course of many decades their research gradually led to an iconic result that has become justly famous: the second law of thermodynamics… In (highly) colloquial terms, the law declares that the production of waste is unavoidable… The law reveals (loosely, again) that everything in the universe has an overwhelming tendency to run down, to degrade, to wither… While history records the steam engine’s central role in the Industrial Revolution, the questions it raised for fundamental science were just as significant… In puzzling over these issues… Carnot launched the field of thermodynamics—the science of heat, energy, and work… his ideas would inspire scientists… to develop a radically new perspective”
Greene writes: “the first law of thermodynamics ensures that the energy balance sheet will balance… The second law of thermodynamics focuses on entropy. Unlike the first law, the second is not a law of conservation. It is a law of growth. The second law declares that over time there is an overwhelming tendency of entropy to increase… In colloquial terms, special configurations tend to evolve toward ordinary ones order tends to descend into disorder (your organized garage degenerates into a haphazard mess of tools, storage boxes, and sporting equipment)… Bake bread and you can be sure that the aroma will shortly fill rooms far from the kitchen… The reason, is that there are many more ways for the aroma molecules to spread compared with ways for them to cluster.”
Greene writes: “we are no closer to answering the question raised by Gottfried Leibniz… “Why is there something rather than nothing?”—than we were when the German philosopher first expressed this lean distillation of the mystery of existence… The fact that we can use mathematics to describe what we think took place nearly fourteen billion years ago, and from that successfully predict what powerful telescopes should now see, well, it is breathtaking. Sure, profound questions abound, like what or who created space and time, and what or who imposed the guiding grip of mathematics, and what or who is responsible for there being anything at all, but [still] we’ve gained powerful insight into the cosmic unfolding.”
Greene writes: “After all, the more finely you examine something that’s alive, the more challenging it is to see that it’s living… Seeking insight into life by homing in on fundamental particles is akin to experiencing a Beethoven symphony instrument by instrument, note by single note… Although we won’t answer the question of life’s origin (still a mystery), we will see that all life on earth can be traced to a common single-celled ancestral species, sharply delineating what a science of life’s origin will ultimately need to explain… Fred Hoyle … referred to the universe being created in “one big bang,” unwittingly coining one of science’s most pithy monikers… The Origin of the Solar System At just over four and a half billion years old, the sun is a cosmic newcomer… The first stars were likely mammoth, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of times the mass of the sun, burning with such intensity that they quickly died out. The heaviest ended their lives in a gravitational implosion so emphatic that they collapsed all the way down to black holes… some 4.7 billion years ago a supernova shock wave likely plowed through a cloud containing hydrogen, helium, and small quantities of more complex atoms, compressing part of the cloud, which, now being denser than its surroundings, exerted a stronger gravitational pull and thus began to draw material inward… The gravitational force squeezed the spherical core… Earth’s first half billion years are referred to as the Hadean period, invoking the Greek god of the underworld to connote an infernal era of raging volcanoes, gushing molten rock, and thick noxious fumes of sulfur and cyanide… Roughly fifty to one hundred million years after its birth, earth likely collided with a Mars-sized planet called Theia, which would have vaporized the earth’s crust, obliterated Theia, and blown a cloud of dust… into space. In time, that cloud would have clumped up gravitationally to form the moon”
Greene writes: “all complex multicellular life descended from the same single-celled ancestral species. Cells are similar because their lineages radiate from the same starting point… the evidence strongly suggests that in seeking life’s origin, the lineages converge to a common ancestor… protein synthesis requires cellular software. And within every cell such instructions exist. They are encoded by DNA, the life-supporting chemical whose geometrical architecture was discovered by Watson and Crick… Every molecule of DNA is configured in the famous spiral of the double helix, a long twisting ladder whose rungs consist of pairs of struts, shorter molecules called bases, usually denoted A, T, G, and C… Members of a given species mostly share the same sequence of letters. For humans, the DNA sequence runs about three billion letters long, with your sequence differing from that of Albert Einstein or Marie Curie or William Shakespeare or anyone else by less than about a quarter of a percent, roughly one letter out of every string of five hundred… But while basking in the glow of possessing a genome so similar to that of any of history’s most revered luminaries (or infamous villains), note that your DNA sequence also has a percent overlap with any given chimpanzee’s.”
Greene writes: “When I first learned about Darwinian evolution, my biology teacher presented the theory as if it were the clever solution to a brain teaser that, once understood, should elicit a gentle slap to the forehead and the exclamation “Why didn’t I think of that?” Darwin’s solution comes down to two connected ideas: First, when organisms reproduce, progeny are generally similar but not identical to their parents. Or, as Darwin put it, reproduction yields descent with modification. Second, in a world with finite resources, there’s competition for survival. Those biological modifications that enhance success in the competition increase the likelihood that the bearer will survive long enough to reproduce and thus pass on their survival-enhancing traits to future generations. Over time, different combinations of successful modifications slowly accumulate, driving an initial population to branch into groups that form distinct species… were Darwinian evolution not supported by data it would have failed to achieve scientific consensus… [Subsequently] Watson and Crick concluded their paper with… : “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”… Watson and Crick revealed the process by which life duplicates the very molecules that store the cell’s internal instructions, allowing copies of the instructions to be passed on to progeny.”
Greene writes: “Essential to evolution is that in the descent from parent to progeny, modifications to DNA are typically few in number. This stability protects genetic improvements built up over previous generations, ensuring that they are not rapidly degraded or wiped out.., copying errors creep in at the rate of roughly one per every one hundred million DNA base pairs. That’s like a medieval scribe getting a single letter wrong per every thirty copies of the Bible… Even such minimal genetic modification, when accumulated over a great many generations, can give rise to massive physical and physiological development. This is not obvious… Life has evolved for billions of years. That’s thousands of millions of years… evolution by natural selection is better described as innovation by trial and error.”
About RNA, Greene writes: “Toward the Origins of Life Back in the 1960s, a number of prominent researchers… drew attention to a close cousin of DNA, called RNA (ribonucleic acid), which some four billion years ago may have jump-started a phase of molecular Darwinism that was the precursor to life… RNA is an extraordinarily versatile molecule that is an essential component of all living systems. You can think of it as a shorter, one-sided version of DNA, comprising a single rail along which a sequence of bases is attached. Among its various cellular roles, RNA is a chemical mediator that takes imprints of various small sections of an “unzipped” strand of DNA … Once molecules acquire the capacity to replicate, chance errors and mutations will feed molecular Darwinism, driving chemical concoctions along the all-important vector of increased fitness. Playing out over hundreds of millions of years, the process has the capacity to build the chemical architecture of life.”
Greene writes: “Notwithstanding the apocryphal palindrome “Madam, I’m Adam,” no one knows when we began to speak or why. Darwin speculated that language emerged from song and imagined that those endowed with Elvis-like talents would more readily attract mates and thus more abundantly seed subsequent generations of gifted crooners… there is wide agreement that human language differs profoundly from any other variety of communication in the animal kingdom… As our hunter-gatherer forebears roamed the plains and forests, the capacity to communicate… was vital for effective group functioning and essential for sharing accumulated knowledge… the FOXP2 gene does appear to be one essential component for normal speech and language… For chimps, the protein encoded by their FOXP2 gene differs from ours by only two amino acids (out of more than seven hundred), while that of Neanderthals is identical to ours… As [some] also noted, it’s one thing to have the physical capability and mental agility to engage in conversation and quite another to actually do so.”
Greene writes: “From the standpoint of natural selection, what matters is the impact this or that behavior would have had on the survival and reproductive prospects of our forebears during the bulk of their history… But recorded history provides information for only the final quarter of 1 percent of the roughly two million years stretching back to the earliest human migrations out of Africa… Faced with the potential of a devastating shortfall in caloric intake, a preference for foods densely packed with sugars has manifest adaptive value. If you were designing the human mind, aware of the human body’s physiological needs and the nature of the ancestral environment, it is easy to imagine that you would program the human brain to encourage its body to eat fruit whenever available. That natural selection arrived at this very strategy is thus not at all surprising..”
Greene writes: “Rather than likening the brain to a general-purpose computer awaiting whatever programming it acquires through experience, the brain is likened to a special-purpose computer, hardwired with programming designed by natural selection to bolster the survival and reproductive prospects of our forebears… For groups of kin, an idea… suggests that evolution by natural selection solves the problem without breaking a sweat. I’m loyal to my siblings, my children, and other close relatives because we share a meaningful portion of our genes… Religion is story, enhanced by doctrines, rituals, customs, symbols, art, and behavioral standards.”
Greene writes: “A Sketch of Religious Roots During the first millennium BC, across India, China, and Judea, tenacious and inventive thinkers reexamined ancient myths and ways of being, entailing among other developments what philosopher Karl Jaspers described as the “beginnings of the world religions, by which human beings still live.”… Religious systems became increasingly organized as adherents set down stories, culled insights, and synthesized directives that, having been channeled through anointed prophets and passed orally from one generation to the next, they hold in common a fascination with the very questions guiding our exploration in these pages: Where did we come from? And where are we going?... Among the earliest surviving written records are the Vedas, composed in Sanskrit on the Indian subcontinent, with portions that date from as far back as 1500 BC… the Vedas… constitutes the sacred texts of what would become the Hindu religion—now practiced by one in seven inhabitants of the earth, about 1.1 billion people… “When it comes to consciousness, Buddhism has something important to say… During roughly the same era that the Buddha was wandering in India, the Jewish people in the Kingdom of Judah were being… forced into exile… Jewish leaders gathered disparate written accounts and oversaw the transcription of oral histories, yielding early versions of the Hebrew Bible— The God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere-present, singular creator of everything.”
Greene writes: “The Urge to Believe explained that we are a species that looks upon the world and sees patterns… Over many generations, natural selection equipped us to identify patterns in how people and objects appear and move, allowing us to identify them rapidly with just a few visual cues… In short, the capacity for recognizing pattern is how we survive… Sometimes, our naturally selected pattern detectors are so primed, so ready to announce that a signal has been found, that they see patterns and envision correlations that are not there. Sometimes we assign meaning to the meaningless.”
Greene writes: “Ever since Edwin Hubble’s observations in the 1920s, we have known that space is expanding: the galaxies are rushing away from one another… Space is expanding, but the rate of expansion must be decreasing … [BUT] they discovered that the expansion is not slowing down. It is speeding up… the expansion has been picking up speed for the past five billion years.”
About dark energy, Greene writes: “The case for dark energy is compelling but circumstantial… because it so adeptly accounts for the observations, dark energy has become the de facto explanation for the accelerated expansion of space… simplicity, while favored conceptually, has no fundamental claim on truth… The mathematical description of dark energy allows for it to weaken, putting the brakes on accelerated expansion, or strengthen, giving additional gas to accelerated expansion.”
Greene writes: “if the universe is eternal, any duration, however long, registers as infinitesimal… Narrated from the perspective of these longer scales, the cosmological accounting would go like this: a moment after the big bang, life arose, briefly contemplated its existence within an indifferent cosmos, and dissolved away… To me, the future that science now envisions highlights how our moment of thought, our instant of light, is at once rare, wondrous, and precious.”
Greene writes: “According to this theory, regions of space like ours go through phases of expansion followed by contraction, with the cycles repeating indefinitely. The big bang becomes the big bounce—a rebound from the previous period of contraction… during each cycle a given region of space stretches far more than it contracts, ensuring the entropy it contains is thoroughly diluted… The duration of each cycle is determined by the value of the dark energy which, based on today’s measurements, sets the duration on the order of hundreds of billions of years… Moreover, since the cycles might persist indefinitely into the past as well as the future, we would need to envision the structure extending infinitely far in both directions… cyclic cosmology has emerged as a main competitor to the inflationary theory… Of course, truth in science is… determined by experiments, observations, and evidence.”
Greene writes: “We pursue meaning... “Earth is a pedestrian planet orbiting an unremarkable star in the suburbs of an ordinary galaxy. If we’re taken out by an asteroid, the universe won’t so much as blink. In the grand scheme of things, it just won’t matter… The doomsday scenario refined my thinking, making it patently evident that our equations and theorems and laws… are, after all, a collection of lines and squiggles drawn on blackboards and printed in journals and textbooks. Their value derives from those who understand and appreciate them. Their worth derives from the minds they inhabit.”
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Randolph Eck
5.0 out of 5 stars So, what does it all mean?
Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2020
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In this book, the author explores the timeline of the universe. We explore the orderly structures of stars and galaxies, and eventually discuss life and consciousness – all within a universe destined to decay. It is a journey across time providing our most refined understanding of the beginning, and the closest science can take us to the very end.
The first major topic for discussion is that of entropy. This is the second law of thermodynamics. The first law – the conservation of energy – declares that the quantity of energy be conserved, whereas, the second declares that the quality of energy deteriorates over time. This entropy thing is traced all the way back to the big bang. It all starts with an inflaton field, an explosive event, and ends with an expanding universe. Quantum non-uniformity left us with the possibility of stars and galaxies via quantum uncertainty, inflationary stretching and gravitational snowballing.
From this topic, we move to the discussion of the atomic and molecular ingredients necessary for life. These elemental building blocks of life had their origins in the output of supernovae and the violent collisions of neutron stars. As we trace the origins of life we see that “All life codes the instructions for building proteins in the same way.” The author also notes “All life meets the challenge of energy extraction and distribution in the same way.” It is interesting to note how RNA blends both “software” and “hardware.” It is like it melds chicken and egg allowing for the capacity to propel an era of molecular Darwinism. The author sees life as physics orchestrated.
The next discussion involves the complexity of the brain and consciousness. Various theories of consciousness are discussed throughout a chapter devoted to this topic. Also discussed is the concept of quantum mechanics and its relevance to consciousness and how this relates to free will. In the end, the author states, “I am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organization has emancipated my behavioral responses” From here we move on to something important to human development and evolution – the concepts of storytelling and the most transformative force: religion. We see that features inherent to human brains that are shaped over eons by the battle for evolutionary supremacy prime us for religious conviction. Did religion then become ubiquitous because of its own contribution to our adaptive fitness? So we can see how storytelling enhanced our understanding of other minds and may have facilitated communal living. But religion is a story that is enhanced by doctrines, rituals, customs, symbols and more. But the fact remains that there is yet no consensus on why religion arose or why it has so tenaciously stood the test of time. And what about the arts? Perhaps, the author notes they may have been “vital for developing the flexibility of thought and fluency of intuition that our relatives needed to fashion the spear, to invent cooking, to harness the wheel …” It is with this perspective that “the arts join language, story, myth, and religion as the means by which the human mind thinks symbolically, reason counterfactually, imagines freely, and works collaboratively.”
In subsequent chapters the author explores how the universe, even though appearing stable, is mutable and precarious. We have dark energy pervading the universe causing a repulsive force expanding the universe ever outward. As this continues distant galaxies will slip beyond the cosmic horizon beyond which we cannot see. Eventually, think a hundred trillion years, star formation will come to a close. Eventually as entropy takes its course with ever more disorder, we will see the end of galaxies and eventually complex atoms and molecules. The author ponders, can somehow thought persist indefinitely. We learn of the concept of a Boltzmann brain – some rare, hypothetical, free-floating, tethered mind. Unfortunately, it appears that life and thought in our universe will likely draw to a close. So even though we can contemplate eternity, apparently we cannot touch eternity. It would be refreshing to think that life and thought could persist in the vast reaches of infinite space – beyond the boundary of our realm.
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Barbara Hall
5.0 out of 5 stars my husband loves it!
Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2024
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It was a gift for my husband and he loves it.
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marlen
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book
Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2024
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A good review offers a balanced perspective, and mine is this book is amazing.
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Max Samfield
3.0 out of 5 stars Tiny Print
Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2024
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I'm big fan of Brian Greene, but I guess the publisher reduced cost by reducing font size. The text is too small, which makes reading it tedious and tiring.
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Russell Zellers
5.0 out of 5 stars This is a amazing and important book, well written and documented.
Reviewed in the United States on September 26, 2022
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For anyone interested in Cosmology and the implications of modern physics, this is a must read. It is, in my mind, an important book that offers a clear understanding, given knowledge to date, of how it all developed and where it is all going. With that said, the book fails to emphasize the importance of TRANFORMATIONS in reality, although perhaps the author feels that the reader will automatically recognize these differences in “levels.” There are transformations from inanimate to living, from atoms to molecules to complex objects, from simpler life forms to conscious beings to community. To me, the author does an amazing job of describing those changes but does not highlight the significant change in the NATURE and QUALITY from one level to the next. Calling it all jiggling bundles of particles may be shortchanging reality. It seems important to sit in awe in recognition of these amazing transitions. The author also does not recognize the possibility of future findings that would be consistent with current understandings. There may exist an underlying, invisible, fabric, ground or field of connected energy throughout all of space/time, invisible like dark matter and gravitational waves. This "ground of being," so named by Paul Tillich, a Theologian, might connect all things into Oneness, including us as living beings and as disorganized particles that serve as fodder for insects after the time of death, uniting the singularity at the time of the Big Bang as well as our current organized universe. To me, it is important to recognize and celebrate the oneness of all things, originally a principle of Eastern religions, but seemingly consistent with the findings of modern physics. This idea does provide some meaning or context to life, implies an ethic, and suggests an immortality of sorts, connections unrecognized in the book.
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Richard B. Schwartz
3.0 out of 5 stars Treading on Complex Ground With Science Alone as Your Guide
Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2020
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This is an interesting but problematic book. Professor Greene is a physicist known for his work in string theory and his popularizations of very complex science. In this book he ventures into the world of philosophy and that may be a bridge too far. The title itself is descriptive of much of the book—an account of the manner in which time will end and, as David Gates put it, the stars will all go out. Fortunately that is not going to happen anytime soon. In fact, it will happen so far into the future that we require metaphors to give us even the barest sense of just how long that will take. The science of the process is fascinating and it is described at great length and as clearly as possible for a lay audience.
The subtitle of the book is more problematic—mind, matter, and our search for meaning in an evolving universe. For Professor Greene the overarching drivers of 'meaning' are two—evolution and entropy, Darwin and the second law of thermodynamics. The first is a real problem. Despite the adulation of the neoDarwinians there are real issues with Darwinian theory. The most learned and articulate of the challengers is David Berlinski, whose work should be read in tandem with Professor Greene's. The gaps in the fossil record, the issues inherent in the Cambrian explosion and other matters challenge us to tread softly before embracing Darwin wholesale. The second part of the dyad—entropy—puts us on more steady ground and should doubtless be a pivotal part of our view of 'reality'.
There are, however, other ways of thinking of these things. In the world of the humanities and the social sciences, e.g. (the world in which Professor Greene is, irrevocably, embedding himself) there are other dyads that could be suggested. In literary studies, for example, we have commonly opposed 'order' and 'energy'. There are traditions and challenges to tradition. In Paradise Lost God is order and Satan is energy. In literary history there is classicism on the one hand and romanticism on the other. In that most orderly of organizations there is the military 'uniform' but also General Patton's pearl-handled revolvers. General officers are permitted to express their energy and exuberance by making adjustments to their uniforms. There is a long tradition at West Point of cadets expressing their expertise through both standard military performance and exuberant, exceptional actions. Dougie MacArthur took a cannon from Trophy Point and put it on top of a building; how he did it remained a classroom problem in engineering courses. Caltech students do the most significant science imaginable but they also mess with the Hollywood sign. When one seeks meaning in a complex universe this dyad is quite useful. It gives us conservative/progressive; it gives us the past and possible futures.
The key problem is that Professor Greene approaches the search for meaning on purely scientific terms, but as he notes (pp. 52-53, 68-69, 72, 116) science is as yet unable to answer Leibniz's question, why is there something rather than nothing? The 'profound questions' that abound (p. 53) include what or who created space and time and what or who imposed the guiding grip of mathematics, and what or who is responsible for there being anything at all. Schrödinger asked what is life, a problem on which science is still laboring, but the question of life's origin remains a mystery (p. 72). And "we have yet to articulate a robust scientific explanation of conscious experience" (p. 116).
Wittgenstein taught us that philosophy is unable to answer the most important questions, but neither is science and philosophy has been trying for a very long time. I believe that Professor Greene does a very nice job of venturing into the world of the arts and humanities, given his academic specialty, but that land is vast. The subject of conscious experience, e.g., is daunting beyond belief, particularly from the point of view of wet neuroscience, but the arguments from dry neuroscience, from, e.g. Locke to Berkeley to Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein may provide a useful framework for exploring the problem.
At the center of the book is the question of how we can cope with our own mortality and Professor Greene offers some interesting and informed answers, though he never offers the philosophic rejoinder that a universe that ultimately lacks meaning is something upon which we should vomit rather than agonize. He needs more Pascal, more Dostoevsky, more Samuel Johnson, more Wittgenstein. Most of all he needs to see that he has entrapped himself by asking ultimate questions while eliminating the obvious answer to many of them. He remains reverently agnostic and that is fine (unless you are writing a book that seeks ultimate meaning); then it is a significant challenge.
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Mikio Miyaki
5.0 out of 5 stars gratitude for being here
Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2023
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Recently, there were two interesting articles related to “Until The End of Time” in Japanese Newspapers. One is that about 20,000 kinds of organic molecules were confirmed in the sand brought back from the planet ”Ryugu” by the Japanese satellite “Hayabusa”. What is even more surprising is that the amino acids used by living creatures on Earth are biased toward left-handed amino acids, but from the amino acids detected this time, almost the same number of “left-handed” and “right-handed” amino acids were found. The other is how far chat AI will continue to evolve. The internet is said to be full of stories created by chat AI. Has it reached a point beyond human thought? Are humans trying to create their own Boltzmann brains? Is the time approaching when the Boltzmann brain will take over AI? Brian Greene reveals that the main characters of this book are “entropy” and “evolution”. Using all the knowledge of modern physics, he explores the fundamental finiteness of the universe to its limit. And he actively picks up “stories” that cannot be told by physics alone. His literary talent, which explains things in an easy-to-understand manner using concrete examples, is admirable. “Eternity” and “immortality” are longing of human beings. Greene argues that the awareness of finiteness does not detract from beauty and pleasure, but rather enhances it. He brings to the fore the preciousness of the present on an overwhelming scale. Breathing, reading, thinking, being moved…all of these are momentary events that are physically possible. Is there any other ”story” that depicts the “gratitude” for our being here at this moment on such a scale and power? What is reborn after reading is above all the “present” before our eyes. The book makes us feel more joy than ever before that we are here at this very moment.
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William Savoie
5.0 out of 5 stars Science meets Reality in the search for meaning
Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2020
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Brian Greene allows us into his private world, he’s brilliant, so it is a fun place to go and visit. In spite of being brilliant, he is not much different from us. For the love of pizza, when 10 years old, he blew up his mother’s kitchen (p. 57-58). Yes, brilliant but like all of us, he has moments of being stupid. His open and exposed approach makes me want to read on. He loves math and wants to go deep into physics. But beyond that shiny collegiate surface he also wants to go much deeper. His older brother has taken a spiritual path (dancing with Hare Krishna p. 203) but on some level he knows his path towards truth is not the same as his older brother.
How does science then, without any beliefs get to the promised land? How does Brian find the inner peace that his brother is dancing to? Of course, it would take 428 pages. But to lay out what appears to me to be his approach, he heads toward the open state Tibetans call Samadhi, but he doesn’t use any religious language. Samadhi isn’t a normal state of thinking thoughts to find answers, but a state of open contemplation beyond thought. Brian does this by expanding your mind, one idea at a time until you become wide open. You get your mind blown. He does all this with wisdom. Wisdom is what happens to you as time takes place. You, as you get older become wise, just because you are older. Brian doesn’t call it wisdom, he only uses time itself, vast amounts of time, and as you contemplate these vast lengths of time, you naturally sense or feel outside of time. Consciousness can use intuition to do that but a strictly logical mind can’t think it. So Brian gives us time to contemplate, and he guards us from having any beliefs.
Beliefs are a problem, because once you have a belief, you can’t do science, you can’t pretend to be open minded, you get stuck. Once you get stuck, you are susceptible to fascism. Fascism happens when you think there is only one way. Fascism is a large part of religion, politics, and science. Once we get stuck, we get really stuck.
Here we are at the start of a world pandemic, with an idiot president pointing at his accomplishments. All of this reality, kind of helps us to read this wonderful book. A book to fight fascism, and to feel the universe giving us a personal hug. Yes, we can all enter Samadhi together.
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Aran Joseph Canes
4.0 out of 5 stars Let me Tell you a Story
Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2020
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It can’t be said that Brian Greene doesn’t aim high in Until the End of Time. In some three hundred pages he tries to explain the Big Bang, cosmic evolution, stellar formation, the beginnings of life, the beginnings of consciousness, the role of art and religion in civilization and the ultimate fate of the universe. Quite a story!
As an explainer of complex scientific theories, particularly physics, Greene is on a par with popularizing scientists like Richard Dawkins or Stephen Hawking. Of course, if you found a Brief History of Time incomprehensible then you are likely to find large parts of Until the End of Time similarly difficult. I had a bit of an edge as my undergraduate major was in physics.
Greene is also honest that many of the phenomena he tries to fashion as chapters in his story remain scientific enigma. He does a good job of reviewing competing theories of life’s origin, the evolutionary grounding of the arts, etc.
What I found hard to justify is the amount of space Greene devotes to speculations about the distant future of the universe. He seems to make the error in reasoning that since we’ve discovered laws of physics that seem to apply to objects billions of years old we can similarly apply these to what the universe will be like in billions of years.
The lacuna in this argument is that modern physics is only a century old. Most of the advances in cosmology are even more recent. Why should we think that a hundred year old discipline can make accurate predictions across uncountable eons in the future?
Astronomers like to point out that human civilization would be only a few seconds long if the history of the universe were condensed to a year. It seems rather myopic to not notice that modern physics is only tenths of a second long and that it will probably evolve in unfathomable ways in the next thousand years, let alone the next billion.
Because Greene spends so much of this book on this topic, even concluding the book with a call to create our own meanings because the universe will finally end in entropic coldness, this seems like a major flaw.
However, much of the book does communicate difficult scientific concepts to a lay audience in a way I could understand. I’m glad I read the book and recommend it to others. I merely think a little humility about the possible developments in a century old human enterprise would’ve made much of the book a little more realistic and less like the outpourings of a wild imagination.
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Sgt Fletcher
5.0 out of 5 stars Should be required reading for every senior in every college....everywhere.
Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2022
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As one who had a pretty solid undergraduate education competing with the best and the brightest, I was able to read "Until the End..." with more ease than I expected. Yet, even with my background, I was forced to dig into the footnotes and further dig into the footnotes to the footnotes.
Frankly, if one one really attempts to truly understand Greene's intent and mindset in putting his thoughts down for all us, we might walk away a bit shaken. And, If not shaken, then one has not understood the book.
For the most part, I found the professional reviews of this book have been vapid and superficial. I even wondered if the reviewer really read the book or had an assistant just write up something that would salsify the editors.
Certainly one needs a background in antiquities, the sciences, languages and linguistics, as well as fundamental knowledge of philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the current age.
We question reality just as much as Jorge Luis Borges did in his iconic short stories. (By the way, I thought that Greene was unaware of Borges, but was proven wrong towards the very end of the book!!!)
Do I feel bad about anything after reading this magnus opus? Yes, I feel bad that Bertram Russel is not around to be able to read this....as well as Albert Einstein and the rest of 19th and 20th century Great Minds.
Frankly, and just to cut it here, I think this is one of the great books of this century and will be read for generations to come by those who know that what they were required to read in University was just not enough to understand "how the World works"
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Jon G. Allen
5.0 out of 5 stars A consummate teacher
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2020
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I read this book while awaiting the cresting wave of the coronavirus. I thought shifting my attention from the threat of immanent death to a cosmic perspective would provide some respite. (Green directly makes this contrast at the end of the book, albeit not in relation to the virus.) I'm ignorant of physics, but I'd read The Elegant Universe and had some hope that I might understand this book. I did, pretty much.
There is much to admire in this book, but what most impressed me is Greene's genius for finding concrete analogies, without which the novice might be hopelessly confused. He must be a fantastic teacher, and he is a great writer. As I'd hoped, he puts our infinitesimally brief flicker of conscious life into cosmic perspective. This perspective is not a downer; the most important word in his title is "until." The message is not new: we should be in awe of our existence and have reverence for it, taking nothing for granted and treasuring every moment. But the cosmic context brings home this ancient message in a particularly edifying way.
Greene's capacious mind is something to behold; the scope of his knowledge is staggering. The sheer detail and precision of the hard-won knowledge about the history of the cosmos attests to the monumental achievements of physicists. Greene embraces reductionism, which has little appeal for me. I am a "bag of particles." He takes this perspective with utmost seriousness. I can accept his view that he is a reductionist; he ought to know. But he is also an expansionist with profound appreciation for the full scope of our humanity along with the significance of the meaning we create for ourselves, bags of particles that we may be.
This is a great book. If the biologists and epidemiologists are right, it will be timely for a long time. But it won't last until the end of time, if the physicists are right. Entropy can be interrupted to give us life, but entropy will prevail in the rather long run.
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Hande Z
5.0 out of 5 stars There's something here
Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2020
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A pulsating book about science, the universe, and us. Why is there something rather than nothing? Brian Greene tells us that no one has adequately answered this Gottfried Leipniz question. Yet Greene knows a lot more than most about science and physics, and in this book, he uses that knowledge to pry answers from questions in other fields. In his chapter on 'Particles and Consciousness', he examines the question of free will. His argument against free will sounds...pretty sound. 'To be free requires that we are not marionettes whose strings are pulled by physical law...for assessing free will, the distinction between [deterministic and probabilistic] is irrelevant. If the fundamental laws can churn never grinding to a halt for lack of human input and applying all the same even if particles happen to inhabit bodies and brains, then there is no place for free will'. Greene, however, believes in a different variety of freedom that allows us to act as if we have free will. His lucid explanation is worth considering.
In another chapter, he discusses the emergence and prevalence of religious beliefs. Citing many scholars who have concluded that religious beliefs are matters that can be traced to evolution because religious beliefs help develop social cohesion. Tribes with greater social cohesion have better chance of survival. Yet there is no consensus, he says, on why religion arose nor why it has so tenaciously remained. But when asked about his belief in God and his belief in quantum physics, Greene says, 'My confidence in quantum mechanics is high, because the theory accurately predicts features of the world, such as the electron magnetic dipole moment, with a precision beyond the ninth decimal place, while my confidence in the existence of God is low because of the paucity of vigorous supporting data
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uncle george
5.0 out of 5 stars Mr Greene as author is extraordinary.
Reviewed in the United States on December 28, 2023
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I thought i would need math book to work through this book but i need to find a quiet place and get the dictionary out so I can be sure of the meanings of what is written. WOW! Still learning at 76 and enjoying the journey.
Thanks Mr. Greene!
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LSOHara
5.0 out of 5 stars Wow!
Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2023
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I don’t have a science background. I’m re-reading this book for the second time and will probably, after thinking about it, read it a third!
This truly has captured my imagination and I am trying to wrap my head around that the human body and brain and all of our organs evolved through a natural progression millions of years in the making. The timescales and distances are so far out there for me, it’s mind-boggling. I understand the implications for those who are religious and believe in a creator, but the explanations put forth in this reading make a lot of sense to me. One of the most profound books I’ve ever read and I will continue to think about the subject matter for a very long time!
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David E. Mann, MD
5.0 out of 5 stars Another mind-expanding book from Brian Greene
Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2020
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I've read all of Brian Greene's books and they are always a mind-expanding experience. This one has less math than his others, and gets into subjects like morality and religion which are normally outside of a physicist's ken. As usual the writing is very entertaining and down to earth, not difficult to understand. His metaphor for long periods of time using the Empire State Building is quite useful. And like his last book, in which infinite space allows pretty much anything not logically impossible to exist (include not one, but infinite copies of ourselves and our own world), vast periods of time allow the improbable to become inevitable, including the random development of brains from patterns of particles, so-called Boltzmann brains. In fact, it is not easy to tell if our brains are in fact Boltzmann brains and our environment simply confabulated. This is the most mind-bending part of the book. But in the end the book is really about finding meaning from life knowing that we are simply masses of particles in particular patterns, doomed to die, just as the Universe someday is most likely to die as well. Along the way we stop briefly on the problem of consciousness, which discussion is unsatisfying as all discussions of consciousness inevitably are. Nevertheless this was an enlightening book. I have always loved books like this, ever since I was a boy and encountered George Gamow's 1 2 3 Infinity. I like the fundamental questions, even if the math and physics are far beyond me. Brian Greene excels at explaining the science at my level, and I appreciate that.
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Michael Montague
5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful Exposition
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2020
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Brian Greene has done it once again. He has taken a set of complex ideas and solely by using simple metaphors and similes, made those concepts accessible to the educated layperson. Perhaps what I admire most about this book is that Professor Greene is able to go back and forth, crisscrossing scientific disciplines, to make his points. After all, science, and what we understand about reality, describes both the fundamental and the emergent. While biology largely examines the emergent, it is nonetheless as critical as physics, with its search for the fundamental, to our understanding our humanity.
Incidentally, the detailed science and all of the equations are still there, but relegated mostly to the footnotes. For those who want the details, they can be found, but the narrative flow continues brilliantly without them.
As a scientist myself, I find some of the negative comments of apparently theist reviewers of this book amazingly confusing---so confusing, in fact, that I wonder whether they actually read the book. While Professor Greene certainly does use our current understanding of science as a bridge toward the understanding of our humanity, he interweaves the science with examples from the arts and humanities, frequently illuminating both. This is not a book about atheism. Nor is it a book with an atheist perspective. This is a book about our best science, and how it can be combined with the best of our own humanity, as often found in the arts, to help us in our universal, ongoing, and necessary search for meaning, as we each create a purpose for our lives. It is a powerful, thoughtful exposition of this interplay of ideas. Highly recommended!
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M. Max
5.0 out of 5 stars An Essential Read
Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2020
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It is not typical for me to purchase the latest science book. But the New York Times review (“…a love letter to the ephemeral cosmic moment when everything is possible…”) caught my attention. Now, having been unable to put the book down, I can say it is thoroughly thrilling and not to be missed. There is a great deal of science covered, but I would not even categorize this as a science book. Greene has come forward with a deeply felt (and deeply moving) meditation on the human condition and has placed this meditation within the ultimate cosmic setting—the development of the universe starting at the big bang and reaching all the way out to timescales of the extremely far future. Developing two overarching themes in which evolution tends to create order while entropy tends to degrade it, the book explores the origin of life, the mysteries of consciousness, the puzzles of free will, the nature of religious experience, the prevalence of creative expression, and inevitable disintegration of everything. Heavy stuff for sure, but Greene’s lyrical writing lightens the load, and his interjection of personal moments adds a human quality that transforms the journey into personal reflection that, at one and the same moment, has a universal appeal. The concepts are not watered down so various sections require focused attention, but Greene holds your hand the whole way, acting as a generous guide to some of the most heady of ideas. I will be thinking about these ideas for a long time to come.
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Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤
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April 7, 2020
"In the search for value and purpose, the only insights of relevance, the only answers of significance, are those of our own making. In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.
Well, this was a bit of a train wreck. It started out interesting. I was really into the first 3 chapters, especially the third, "Origins and Entropy". After that, as another reviewer ironically noted, the book itself appears to suffer an increase in entropy.
Brian Greene is a theoretical physicist but in this book he veers off into philosophy and linguistics and sociology and other sciences. 'Round and around we go. It was all over the place. It seemed to me that Mr. Greene decided to write a book about the future of the universe using his speciality of physics, but then found he had only enough material for a few chapters. Therefore, perhaps at the insistence of his publisher, he decided to add more chapters by discussing other scientific fields he has read up on.
And he lost me. Perhaps it was simply that I was really wanting some cold hard facts, something that would require my brain to let go of every other thought and just focus on what I was reading. Something that would give my brain some structure for a time. Some people escape through reading with books that don't require any or much thought. That doesn't work for me. In order to escape reality (and who doesn't want to escape a little during a pandemic?!) I need a book that demands total attention. A book that engages my grey matter sufficiently that I let go of all my present worries. Books on this subject are often my ticket to escape. Unfortunately, this particular one just didn't do it.
It meandered and so did my thoughts. Though it sometimes talked of complex physics, it more often talked about things that didn't require my full attention.
I do appreciate that it doesn't require a background in complex mathematics as some physics books do. It's easy to understand, though I found there to be far too many explanations and examples for just about everything. I got it the first time, I kept thinking; now the additional examples just gives my brain cells room to think (obsess!) about teeny tiny viruses.
4-5 stars for the first 3 chapters. 2 for the filler chapters. 5 stars for the next to last chapter and 3 for the last. I'm no mathematician but I'll just do a rough estimate and average it out to 3 stars.
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BlackOxford
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April 8, 2024
“I Think That I Think, Therefore I Think That I Am”
- Ambrose Bierce
I am reminded not only of Ambrose Bierce’s aphorism above (which is mentioned by Greene) but also of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s comment upon visiting a bridge under construction in the North of England. Hearing the almost incomprehensible Scots and Geordie banter among the workers, he remarked ‘Isn’t it amazing what people who talk like that can do?’
It is indeed almost miraculous what human beings can do with language. But many believe they can use language not just to build bridges but to tell the rest of us about ultimate reality. Descartes used language to prove the reality of his own existence in his famous Cogito Ergo Sum. Before him, Anselm of Canterbury used language to demonstrate what he thought was the reality of the divine by simply defining God as ‘that of which nothing greater can be thought’. Brian Green thinks we’ll eventually be able to explain everything about reality - ourselves and God included - if we just tell enough stories about it.
Greene considers himself a reformed reductionist - that is, someone who used to believe in one fundamental story about reality. He now believes that the scientific stories by chemists, physicists, and biologists are not the only stories that are meaningful. “There are many ways of understanding the world,” he says. A non-scientist who reads novels, biographies, and poetry can only agree. What matters for him is that the stories that are told are increasingly consistent and coherent with each other. It is unclear how he proposes to compare, say, Finnegans Wake and the second law of Thermodynamics for consistency and coherence. Nevertheless, this is his measure not just of scientific progress but also of human cultural development.
The story he likes best because of its inclusiveness is that of gravity and entropy. The way he tells it, gravity is the force which sparked the entire cosmos in the Big Bang. A small and statistically unlikely perturbation in the microscopic ball of proto-energy caused that extremely low entropy ball to expand in a billionth of a second to a universe billions of light years in size. The photons and other nuclear material contained in the original singularity are spread through newly existing high-entropy space virtually instantaneously. Ever since, gravity and entropy have been in a continuous battle, driving not just the creation and destruction of galaxies, stars and planets, but also the life that has emerged on the latter, including us. We are little islands of relatively low entropy, contributing the best we can to the eventual heat-death of the universe. Even without our industrial level carbon footprints, we can’t help but turn high quality energy into useless background radiation.
Great story. But here’s a layman’s problem: Gravity hasn’t been considered a force, much less the originary creative force, since Einstein formulated his theory of relativity. Gravity, as I understand it, is a perturbation of space-time. So when Greene states “According to the general theory of relativity, the gravitational force can be repulsive,” I start to get seriously confused. Did space-time exist before the Big Bang? If not, how can gravity be its motivating factor?
And Greene goes on to explain that critical moment of orgasmic cosmic release, “When a tiny speck of space finally makes the statistically unlikely leap to low entropy, repulsive gravity jumps into action and propels it into a rapidly expanding universe—the Big Bang,” I am left speechless as he treats this non-thing of entropy as a substance that colonises the newly formed world. Entropy is not a force or a substance but a descriptive condition. Having it do cosmic battle with another non-force/non-substance like gravity seems to me to be pushing a metaphor beyond its design tolerances.
Is he condescending to popular usage or just being sloppy? In any case, I’d really like to understand how a tiny nick in the constitution of the speck of initial energy could cause an apparent violation of quantum laws of movement wherein light and atomic particles can move millions of time faster than photons (not to mention matter) can travel. His cavalier treatment of time and alternative entropic ‘trials’ before the Big Bang seem to me just hand-waving. I felt like an eager adolescent searching for the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But just when things start to get really hot, Greene changes the subject.
According to this story, if the universe is expanding forever, entropy is the winner of the cosmic game and the universe is effectively eternal. On the other hand, if there is an ultimate cosmic collapse, gravity triumphs. But in the latter case, there would be a limit to gravity’s reign, just as there is in the formation of stars. When densities increase sufficiently, nuclear fusion kicks in, and gravity gets checked and the gravity/entropy “two-step” is ignited anew. So the whole process would start again - and crucially not from the same place as the Big Bang. But this too implies eternity.
Eternity bothers me because it points to something beyond language. It’s an indication, like the word ‘God’, of the ultimate inadequacy of language to describe reality (‘reality’ is also one of those words). I am encouraged that Greene doesn’t think that a single scientific or mathematical story is sufficient and that we must ‘sweep in’ as many accounts of existence as we can, including non-scientific ones. But I despair when someone like Greene thinks that this will improve our understanding of reality. It may help us to stop persecuting each other; it will certainly result in faster, more powerful, and more varied machines and products of all sorts. But it will get us no closer to reality, to that which is permanently beyond language.
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Kevin Kuhn
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May 21, 2022
A remarkable book. Did you ever wish you could sit down with one of the top theoretical physicists, someone that was responsible for groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory, and ask them about life, the universe, and everything? Well . . . wish granted.
Let’s start with a couple of warnings. If physics isn’t your thing, if you don’t find the double-slit experiment mind-blowing, or the relatively recent discovery of the Higgs Boson particle shocking, you may find this book - a quantum leap too far. But, if you’ve ever wondered why there is something instead of nothing, or how life or consciousness may have started, you’ll find this book entirely readable, although you may have to clear headspace to fully digest it. IMHO, Greene breaks through in this book, from being an excellent communicator and making the insanely complex understandable (his prior books), to an author that is profound and a great storyteller (this book).
A second warning, this book contains some truths that are disturbing and may create extreme existential dread. His explanations of the relentless march of entropy, the case for predestination, and the various terminations of Earth, life, and reality itself, can be difficult to accept. If you have strong religious sensitivities, you also may want to think twice about reading this book. However, I will add that Greene wrote this work with humility and empathy. The book is meticulously researched, he never asks you to take his word. It has 74 pages of footnotes and references. In addition, he shows compassion for the reader, recognizing the moments that cause anxiety and softening them with his stories of his own prior bias and fears.
If you still want to continue, you will be richly rewarded. Green tells a cohesive story which begins with the lure of eternity, then follows with the origin of the universe, life, and consciousness, recognizes the special nature of belief, language, and stories, and ends with an examination of the end of all things. It’s a compelling tale, supported by math, facts, and the continuous progress of physics. You’ll dive into the big bang, black holes, evolution, DNA, and consciousness. His prose is often as good as any fiction novelist and the story arc of the universe is the most majestic of all tales.
A masterwork by a brilliant scientist that has taken the time to share his life’s work with us in a breathtaking and compassionate way. A grand journey through matter and time, revealing difficult truths, but leaving space to appreciate beauty and meaning in our existence. Five stars going supernova one by one.
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Brian Clegg
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February 18, 2020
Things start well with this latest title from Brian Greene: after a bit of introductory woffle we get into an interesting introduction to entropy. As always with Greene's writing, this is readable, chatty and full of little side facts and stories. Unfortunately, for me, the book then suffers something of an increase in entropy itself as on the whole it then veers more into philosophy and the soft sciences than Greene's usual physics and cosmology.
So, we get chapters on consciousness, language, belief and religion, instinct and creativity, duration and impermanence, the ends of time and, most cringe-making as a title, 'the nobility of being'. Unlike the dazzling scientific presentation I expect, this mostly comes across as fairly shallow amateur philosophising.
Of course it's perfectly possible to write good science books on, say, consciousness or language - but though Greene touches on the science, there far too much that's more hand-waving. And good though he is at explaining physics, I'm not sure Greene is the right person for the job of dealing with these softer subjects.
Overall, despite the problems I had with it, it's a slick, well-written book, but it's not what I want from a popular science title - too subjective, too flowery and lacking the sense of wonder and fascination I want from good science writing. It may well appeal if touchy-feely is your thing, and Greene continues to add in little scientific asides as he goes, but I'm afraid I lost interest in a big way.
It often seems that science writers have to get one 'inner feelings' kind of book off their chest: hopefully Greene can now return to what he does best.
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Infinite Jen
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November 12, 2023
Are you the type of person who gets teary eyed from thinking about a cosmos studded with stars that are constantly engaged in thermonuclear bickering with a relentless gravitational crush? Well, hold on, I’ve got something in my eye. Have you ever, after deliriously consuming grandma’s confections with your scalded bare hands, saw a remaining dollop of sugary goodness sitting squarely in the middle of the pie pan, the edges of which, if taken as points, all seemed perfectly equidistant from the remains? If you’re anything like me, that moment marked for you a turning point, in which the Schwarzschild Radius ceased to be a mere theoretical construct, and came to inform your taste in apple pie henceforth.
So, first things first. There’s an obvious comparison to be made here for anyone that’s read The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, and if you have, imagine that this book is basically that, but focused less on psychology, and more on The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and how life staves off entropic degradation on the molecular level. If you’re not familiar with that book, or if you think I’m invoking Aleister Crowley; let me summarize. Becker argued that much of the striving we do in life is motivated by the dichotomy between our ability to reach towards the divine while being creatures who go back into the dirt. This cognitive dissonance, he reasoned, causes us to muster our creative and industrious impulses in the face of this absurdity. In a similar fashion, this book covers key scientific insights in our ongoing quest to discover our place in the cosmos, and reconcile the knowledge of not only our own impermanence, but that of the universe as well.
Here’s some things you’ll learn about: The salience of entropy in our lives (The aforementioned Second Law not to be confused with a Crowley injunction). Evolution by natural selection. Speculation on the antecedents of DNA. The central importance of Redox Reactions in metabolizing pie, and Black Holes. After this, the book necessarily becomes more philosophical in nature, with examinations of epistemology, language, consciousness, free will, religion, and finally our raison d'être. Some people may be put off by this move into the speculative and poetic, and if you’re looking for a book that’s purely grounded in scientific reasoning, look elsewhere.
For me, as a person who, while not religious, does experience awe in the way that Einstein captured in his more deistic scribbling, I found it highly enjoyable, and would recommend it to anyone with a similar disposition. Greene, as usual, writes in a witty and accessible style, and adopts an appropriately humble and open minded position on the big questions of our existence.
Let’s close this review out with a couple of quotes.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” — Carl Sagan.
“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.” — Albert Einstein.
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Barbara
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February 24, 2024
Brian Greene is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist who writes books about science for the general public.
Author Brian Greene
In this tome, Greene contemplates the universe, from it's inception to it's inevitable demise. Greene writes, "Planets and stars and solar systems and galaxies and even black holes are transitory. The end of each is driven by its own distinctive combination of physical processes, spanning quantum mechanics through general relativity, ultimately yielding a mist of particles drifting through a cold and quiet cosmos."
We don't need to worry much about the end of the universe because it probably won't happen for trillions and trillions of years. On the other hand, the end for an individual living creature - like a human being - is much closer.
Greene suggests that the knowledge of inevitable death drives people to leave a mark, to accomplish something that lasts beyond themselves. This may be the impetus that inspires scientists, scholars, artists, musicians, writers, etc.
In fact it's what drives Greene himself. He writes, "I've gone forward with an eye trained on the long view, on seeking to accomplish something that would last."
The decay of the universe is driven by the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the production of waste is unavoidable. Greene notes, "The second law describes a fundamental characteristic inherent in all matter and energy, regardless of structure or form, whether animate or inanimate. The law reveals (loosely) that everything in the universe has an overwhelming tendency to run down, to degrade, to wither." In other words, disorder is more likely than order.
Greene provides simple examples to demonstrate this. For instance, if you vigorously shake 100 coins and throw then down, it's a hundred billion billion billion times more likely that you'll get 50 heads and 50 tails (a high entropy, low order configuration) rather than all heads or all tails (a low entropy, high order configuration).
So going from the past to the future, entropy is overwhelmingly likely to increase.
You may ask, 'How then did organized things like stars, planets, bacteria, rhododendrons, dogs, humans, etc. come to be'?
Greene explains that (temporary) organization occurs via the entropic two-step, which is a "process in which the entropy of a system decreases because it shifts a more than compensating increase in entropy to the environment." To use humans as an example, we take in energy (food, air) to sustain our bodies, but we give off even more energy as waste products (heat).
A burning question for scientists, philosophers and much of the general public is 'How did life begin?' In the eyes of physicists like Greene, the 'molecular spark' that animated a collection of particles to 'come alive' is explainable by natural laws we haven't yet discovered. The particles themselves slowly formed after the Big Bang, eventually organizing into proto DNA-like molecules that could reproduce themselves....
......and finally into RNA, DNA, proteins, and other molecules that make up living things. Greene explains all this in detail, and - for me - was among the most interesting parts of the book.
As masses of particles that follow universal laws, do we have free will, unlike a rock for example? This is a question of great interest to many philosophers and scientists. Greene observes that, "as living creatures [our] particles are so spectacularly ordered, so breathtakingly configured, that they can undertake exquisitely choreographed motions that are not possible for [rocks]." So we can walk, cook, read, play computer games, go shopping, play sports, and so on. Though our particles ARE bound by physical laws, and we DON'T have free will, we apparently CAN control our behavior. Greene is a bit murky about this, and I would have liked a better explanation. 😏
Greene explains how Darwinian evolution drove the development of living things, from the simple to the complex. For instance, animal life advanced from single celled organisms,
to primitive creatures like sponges,
to more complex organisms like fish,
to land animals like salamanders,
and on and on to VERY intelligent primates (us).
It all happened because of Darwin's law of natural selection or 'survival of the fittest.'
For humans, natural selection favored physical traits - including our big brains - that allowed us to use tools; run from danger; kill prey; make fires; build shelters; etc. Greene posits that more nebulous human endeavors, like language; story-telling; art; religion; music; and so on ALSO helped us survive.
Greene's lengthy discussions about this are a little cloudy, but I got the jist....such behaviors cement us into communities, which are adaptive for survival. In any case, they fit into the 'survival of the fittest' scenario.
Getting back to the fate of the universe, Greene mentions various theories about the destiny of the cosmos. Scientists have observed that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. No one knows what will happen in the future, but various possibilities are suggested, such as: the rate of expansion will speed up even more and the universe will rip apart;
the expansion will slow down and the universe will collapse with a big crunch;
the universe will collapse and expand over and over again...like a sort of cosmic yoyo; and more.
These discussions include consideration of gravity, repulsive gravity; dark energy, electromagnetic and nuclear forces, the Higgs field, and other such things that physicists love. No matter what, however, the universe will ultimately disintegrate into widely separated teeny tiny particles that are randomly drifting around.
As for humanity, we won't be around forever. Greene writes, "The entire duration of human activity - whether we annihilate ourselves in the next few centuries, are wiped out by a natural disaster in the next few millennia, or somehow find a way to carry on until the death of the sun, the end of the Milky Way, or even the demise of complex matter - would be fleeting."
So, does human life matter. If we won't survive for eternity, should we sit back and do nothing? Greene doesn't think so. He writes "our moment is rare and extraordinary" and "it's utterly wondrous that a small collection of the universe's particles can rise up, examine themselves and the reality they inhabit, determine just how transitory they are, and with a flitting burst of activity create beauty, establish connection, and illuminate mystery."
So go on and do your thing. 😊
Greene includes the work and opinions of many scientists and philosophers in his discussions, and tells personal anecdotes to illustrate some points - like the time he blew up the oven at the age of ten; or was thrilled by the aurora borealis; or saw his daughter let go of a soaring swing and tumble to the ground.
Greene has the rare ability to make difficult concepts accessible to non-specialists, and for science and math nerds, there are extensive notes (and a few equations) at the end of the book. All in all, a book worth reading for people interested in the subject.
You can follow my reviews at https://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot....
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Ryan Boissonneault
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February 26, 2020
Problems with the physicalist approach to Big History
Big history is a specific approach to history that examines the universe and the human story at its largest possible scales, from the big bang to the present to the distant future. It seeks to unify all physical, biological, psychological, and historical events within a single explanatory framework, often reductionist in nature. Since everything in such a history is claimed to be ultimately reducible to the laws of physics (in the reductionist versions), such a narrative seems particularly suited for a theoretical physicist to tell.
Enter Brian Greene and his latest foray into the field of big history, Until the End of Time. There’s no question that Greene is well-suited for the task; in addition to his deep expertise in theoretical physics, he also has the unmatched ability to clearly explain complex scientific concepts. The beginning chapters are a testament to this, as Greene takes the reader through the origins of the universe to the present day by explaining, with a liberal dose of clever analogies, how the fundamental concepts of entropy, energy, and evolution guide the physical, chemical, and biological processes that make up our world.
While some may find this narrative approach (which is conspicuously devoid of anything “supernatural” or “divine”) depressing, others (like me) will find it utterly fascinating and even, in a sense, liberating. Greene shows us that by contemplating the universe at its largest scales—and by recognizing the impermanence of everything—we can come to more deeply appreciate our fleeting moments on this earth. And, even more importantly, we can learn to embrace the responsibility we all have to create our own meaning in our lives, while avoiding the somewhat childish view that meaning has to be imposed on us from above for life to have any value.
As the book progresses, however, things get murkier. Philosophically, one thing you can say about Green is that he is consistent in his reductionist stance. Greene believes that everything can be explained—at least theoretically—with reference only to the laws and motions of fundamental particles. He does admit, however, that the prospect of actually doing this is virtually impossible, as the human mind (and for that matter any computer) does not have the cognitive or computational capacity to make such calculations.
The eruption of a volcano, the causes of the second World War, and your inner experiences and emotions, for example, could be explained by physical laws, it’s just that we don’t have the capability of doing so. This is why we must study geological phenomena, history, and psychology at different, emergent levels, levels that we can cognitively handle. But this doesn’t mean that, in reality, it’s not “physics all the way down,” which Greene unabashadely believes.
This qualified reductionist approach, however persuasive it appears, runs into its biggest challenge in the chapter on consciousness. In fact, it is here that I believe Greene’s philosophy is most subject to criticism.
To say that consciousness is reducible to the motions of particles is to not fully appreciate the difference between scientific explanation and experience itself. Thomas Nagel, in his famous essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, neatly elucidates the problem. As Greene wrote:
“Since our mode of engagement with the world is profoundly different [from the bat], there is just so far our imagination can take us into the bat’s inner world. Even if we had a complete accounting of all the underlying fundamental physics, chemistry, and biology that make a bat a bat, our description would still seem unable to get at the bat’s subjective “first-person” experience. However detailed our material understanding, the inner world of the bat seems beyond reach. What’s true for the bat is true for each of us.”
This demonstrates, at least to me, that there is another aspect to consciousness that is clearly not of a physical nature (also see the philosophical experiment Mary’s Room). What does it even mean to say that a thought, or the experience of the color red, is physical? Science advances by ignoring subjective experience and by quantifying the objects of experience. It is therefore a mistake to think that science can turn in on consciousness and quantify it in the same manner, without any major intellectual revolution in how we see the world.
Well, Brian Greene seems to think that all we need is more physics and neuroscience and we can finally understand, not only what it is like to be a bat, but our own consciousness. This, despite the fact that every advance in neuroscience gets us no closer to understanding consciousness than the ancient Greeks. I’m just not convinced that more of the same is going to make any difference (or how it even could make any difference).
In regard to possible intellectual revolutions, Greene mentions panpsychism but fails to mention the Interface Theory of Perception, which says that the relationship between our perceptions and reality is like the relationship between a desktop interface and a computer. According to this theory, we have for centuries been under the impression that science investigates the natural world when all it has been investigating is the “virtual desktop” of the brain, which tells us as much about the natural world as our computer interface tells us about the circuits of the computer. This, I believe, may be a promising line of research but will fundamentally alter the way we think about reality (see The Case Against Reality by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman).
Next, Greene addresses free will, telling us, unsurprisingly, that it is an illusion. Since he already told us that consciousness is simply the physical arrangement of particles in our brain, then it follows that our thoughts and actions are entirely determined by physical laws. His physicalism forces him to this conclusion, but, as we saw, if he’s wrong about consciousness, he could also be wrong about free will.
The reader should keep in mind that if free will is bound up with consciousness—and if we don’t yet have a coherent scientific account of consciousness—then we don’t yet have a coherent scientific account of free will. Therefore, there is little compulsion for me to jettison my own belief in some form of free will—based on the totality of my experience—on the basis of a scientific explanation that doesn’t exist.
It’s also worth considering the implications of Greene’s position, if he is right and our behavior is entirely physically determined. If Greene is right, it means that the big bang set off a mathematically-defined, predetermined course for every particle in the universe, some of which would eventually coalesce into the solar system, earth, life, humans, minds, and eventually Brian Greene, who would write a book telling you, the reader, that your subjective experience of free will is actually an illusion that you can’t help but thinking due to this very sequence of events.
If he is right, of course, this is pretty amazing, especially since that would mean that the physical laws have conspired over billions of years so that he, Brain Greene, can serve as the messenger of such a profound insight. But I think you can forgive me for thinking that this may not be the case. Consciousness and free will are still open questions that we are nowhere near understanding.
There is one further point that no scientist or physicalist has ever, as far as I know, adequately addressed. It is this: If everything is determined, and free will doesn’t exist, and no conscious creatures could have acted otherwise than they did, then what function does consciousness serve? If everything is predetermined by the laws of physics, then what good does it do me (or any conscious creature) to have the illusion of choice?
Stated another way, if physical processes produce consciousness, but consciousness does not have a reciprocal effect on physical processes, then consciousness is entirely inept at impacting any outcome whatsoever. Therefore, if we follow Greene in his physicalism, consciousness completely loses its evolutionary rationale.
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La Crosse County Library
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September 14, 2022
Review originally published January 22, 2021
“How utterly wonderous it is that a small collection of the universe’s particles can rise up, examine themselves and the reality they inhabit, determine just how transitory they are, and with a flitting burst of activity create beauty, establish connection, and illuminate mystery.”
As a child, I remember feeling this deep sadness when I looked out the window and into the sky lit up by the Sun and knew that billions of years into the future the Sun would die. I don’t exactly remember how I came to know this fact, whether through a book, my parents telling me, or via one of the many space shows and documentaries playing on the family TV. In any case, it was one of those moments that caused me to reflect on my own impermanence—if the Sun couldn’t burn forever, then what did that mean for my own prospects?
While scary because of the brief existential crisis this revelation caused, as I have grown and had more of those moments, it has stayed scary, but has increasingly become tempered with a sense of awe and wonder at the world around me.
I think that’s what physicist Brian Greene’s aim is with this book, Until the End of Time (2020), an exploration of the history and possible futures of the universe we inhabit as well as a journey into the past, present, and future of the equivalently vivid inner world that is the human mind.
Coming into this book, I did not expect it to be as philosophical as it is, even with the book’s full title being, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. Emphasis on “search for meaning!” In my mind, science and philosophy were mutually exclusive.
However, the book’s dual approach—a unique meshing of logical science and philosophy—is exactly what made Until the End of Time such a compelling read. While I would be lying if I said I understood all of the physics behind our universe’s beginning, middle, and end, the fact that science points to sentient life beginning (and probably ending) in a cosmological blink of an eye is as clear of a statement on our transience as we can get. Not to mention that conditions conducive to life, self-aware or otherwise, appear to have emerged by chance, merely one out of many possibilities set into motion after the Big Bang, and overseen by immutable physical laws.
Whew! Yes, pretty heavy stuff, especially after the year 2020 turned out to be. The existential blow perhaps dealt by this book is softened somewhat by Greene’s accessible writing and his infectious wonder at the continued quest to answer the big questions, scientific or otherwise. It takes a certain humility to contemplate the mortality of humanity, and perhaps of the universe, and admit there’s still so much we don’t know and have yet to discover.
I would highly recommend this book. It does what all good books should do in changing your perspective on the world and all of its inhabitants.
See also: The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), The Elegant Universe (2010), The Hidden Reality (2011), all by Brian Greene
-Cora
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Susan
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February 18, 2020
I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway.
“In the fullness of time all that lives will die.”
That is the first sentence of the first chapter of Brian Greene’s new book, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe.
The first sentence pretty much sums up the whole thesis of the book—one day we will die. We all will, each as individuals. But also, one day, all of humanity and the world we reside in, will cease to be. Time will end.
I found this book to be more philosophical than Greene’s previous works, and he doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.
In Chapter One (The Lure of Eternity), Greene wonders about our ability to think. Is thought a physical process?
In Chapter Two (The Language of Time), he calls up the second law of thermodynamics, which states that all things deteriorate over time. He asks, Why is the future different from the past?
Chapter Three (Origins and Entropy) wonders, with the second law of thermodynamics “burden[ing] the universe with a relentless increase in disorder”, how do we come to have such organized structures such as atoms, nature, and our brains?
Chapter Four (Information and Vitality) moves into the question of: What is life? “If we could identify what animates a collection of particles, what molecular magic sparks the fires of life, we would take a significant step toward understanding life’s origin and the ubiquity or not, of life in the cosmos.”
Chapter Five (Particles and Consciousness) dives into the question of our conscious interior lives. This was one of the more interesting chapters as Greene seeks to understand where our conscious thought even comes from. “Can matter on its own, produce the sensations infusing conscious awareness? Can our conscious sense of autonomy be nothing more than the laws of physics acting themselves out on the matter constituting brain and body?” In this chapter, the author explores our concept of free will as well as acknowledges that our understanding of the physical brain is incomplete in that it cannot explain “subjective sensations.”
In Chapter Six (Language and Story), Greene wonders at how language has opened up the possibility of story-telling and imagination. The complexity of our language system and grammar structures is what sets us apart from all other animals. In this chapter, Greene explores this idea in depth, providing a history of linguistic thought.
Chapter Seven (Brains and Belief) discusses our inner world and the development of religious beliefs.
Chapter Eight (Instinct and Creativity) explores humanity’s creation of art and its seeming insignificance towards aiding the survival of our species. “[W]hen our perceptions blend thought and emotion, when we feel thoughts as well as think them, our experience steps yet farther beyond the bounds of mechanistic explanation. We gain access to worlds otherwise uncharted.”
Chapter Nine (Duration and Impermanence) explores the uncomfortable idea that our time (not just us as individuals, but the enduring ability to have thoughts and ideas) is finite. “Even those features of the cosmos that may present as enduring—the expanse of space, the distant galaxies, the stuff of matter—all lie within the reach of time.”
Chapter Ten (The Twilight of Time) discusses the inevitability that time as we know and experience it will eventually end.
The final chapter (The Nobility of Being) basically works to summarize the main ideas explored in the preceding chapters and to leave the reader with the still-unanswered big questions:
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”
“What sparked the onset of life?”
“How did conscious awareness emerge?”
Greene’s writing is enriched through his use of analogy and metaphor, which also makes the book approachable for the non-physicist. I first knew Greene through his appearances on NOVA and other PBS and Science Channel programming, so I continuously found myself imagining him narrate the book while graphics popped up to explain his analogies even further. He also provides a rich commentary on how the big questions presented in this book have been examined historically and who the big players were in asking and attempting to resolve the questions and paradoxes. As I read this book, I saw some parallels to Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari’s historic account of humanity, but from the perspective of a physicist.
Overall, I found Until the End of Time to be an engaging, sincere, and thought-provoking examination of the past, present, and future of one of the most intriguing of all concepts: TIME.
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Radiantflux
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March 8, 2020
26th book for 2020.
This came across as an interesting, but somewhat poorly constructed book.
The early chapters on the physics of entropy were interesting, but then we suddenly had chapters on language and consciousness, which felt somewhat randomly tacked on; and while Greene is clearly very smart, the chapters were not particularly deep—just what you could expect from someone smart who had read up a bit a topic that interested them. And then we had some deep-time ultimate fate of the Universe stuff tacked on at the end.
3-stars.
