Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

Product Information

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. This was a funny buddy read in the book club and I really had a fun time learning a lot about our universe and how it has looked billions of years in the past as well as how it might look billions and trillions of years in the future. Greene was really good at giving examples via metaphors that made things feel more easily grasped by a layperson, something I very much appreciated since I'm not a physics major.

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 Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe is a popular science book by American physicist Brian Greene. The book was published in February 2020 by Alfred A. Knopf. [1] [2] [3] It was also translated into Indonesian version entitled " Hingga Akhir Waktu: Akal Budi, Zat, dan Pencarian Makna dalam Alam Semesta yang Berevolusi" published in February 2022 by Gramedia. [4] This is his fifth full-length book. 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.

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 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.

Until the End of Time is a departure from his previous works. He spends significantly less time with the math and physics that help to explain the fabric of our existence and delves into more humanistic and spiritualistic realms. Greene starts with discussing the opposing forces of gravity and entropy and how the interplay between these two forces has allowed the conditions for matter and life. I was along for the ride during this discussion. The cosmological journey explores many of the scientific topics you might anticipate— the big bang, the emergence of galaxies, stars, and planets, the formation of complex atoms and molecules, and then on to the emergence of life. But a theme of the book is to consider these developments as part of a larger narrative arc—one that embraces the most iconic of human activities. And so the cosmological story leads us through the emergence of language, story, myth, religion, creative expression, and the very explorations of science itself. The unifying thread tying it all together is our common drive to find coherence in reality. 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." 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. 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.

Success!

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.” 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.

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.” I want to make something clear, I REALLY like Brian Greene. I've read all previous books that he's written and was absorbed the entire time. He truly has brought conceptual theoretical physics to the masses and I will forever be grateful to him. Chapter Seven (Brains and Belief) discusses our inner world and the development of religious beliefs. I love science, physics and cosmology and have studied these topics for decades. But, there’s always more to learn and this book is one of the most comprehensive. I’ve read. The one caveat, that might make this book a difficult read for some, is the amount of physics and mathematics that (I think) the reader should know prior to reading. I even found myself rereading some sections to really understand the concepts. But, if one is willing to skim past some of the more complex topics there’s still a lot of knowledge to be gained. 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.

Author Q&A

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. 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?’ There is false divide that’s been set up between the humanities and the sciences. We are all in search of coherence and understanding. We may pursue the patterns of life and the cosmos in different ways, but the paths are all directed toward a deeper grasp of experience and reality. Many devote their lives to one or another approach; thankfully, such passionate and penetrating thinkers, artists, and scientists, push the boundaries of understanding clear across the world’s disciplines. My own focus for decades has been in mathematics, cosmology, and Einstein’s quest for a unified theory of all of nature’s forces. But the deepest insights come from approaching mysteries from a broad range of perspectives, combining realizations from many distinct explorations. Much to his credit, Miller mentions paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould and geneticist Richard Lewontin’s 1979 “Spandrels of San Marco” paper in Chapter Five (“The Mind of a Primate”), hailing it as a major critique of the adaptationist view of Natural Selection prevalent in current evolutionary theory and especially, its recognition that other evolutionary processes, not only Natural Selection, are responsible for the history of life on our planet. Gould and Lewontin were responding to the “just so” tales of evolutionary adaptations in organisms, noting that such “adaptations” may be unintended consequences of evolution, in a manner consistent with the existence of spandrels within the domes of cathedrals like the one in San Marco, Italy that appear – and Miller notes this in italics - “whether you want them or not.” It is this expansionist view of evolution that underscores his subsequent discussion of the emergence of reason, human consciousness and free will. The point then, is that when evaluating free will there is much to be gained by shifting attention from a narrow focus on ultimate cause to a broader perusal of human response. Our freedom is not from physical laws that are beyond our ability to affect, our freedom is to exhibit behaviors—leaping, thinking, imagining, observing, deliberating, explaining, and so on—that are not available to most other collections of particles.Human freedom is not about willed choice, everything science has so far revealed has only strengthened the case that such volitional intercession in the unfolding of reality does not exist. Instead, human freedom is about being released from the bondage of an impoverished range of responses that has long constrained the behavior of the inanimate world.”