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

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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? 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.

It is a journey that takes us from the beginning of time to something akin to the end, and through the journey explore the breathtaking ways in which restless and inventive minds have illuminated and responded to the fundamental transience of everything.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. 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. The essence of everything Greene says in the book is reductionism. It is clear that Greene is a staunch reductionist. While he tries to delicately guide the reader down a path of innocent objectivism, he clearly is trying to argue a singular point: everything is only matter. There is nothing else beyond the matter of your brain and the universe. I found myself rather annoyed at the end of this book as Greene leaves little question in the air if there is anything besides just particles. It is a forgone conclusion in his mind which he doesn't even leave open to speculation. I found this... arrogant. I get annoyed when physicists (like Hawking) translate their experiences with theoretical physics into being authorities on spirituality and religion. I'm afraid to say that Greene is guilty of this conceit in Until the End of Time. Greene may be a brilliant physicist but he doesn't know EVERYTHING. Sorry. The above quote and so many others make me swoon over Brain Greene books. This book was filled with such phrases from beginning to end.

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, 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. 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.

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I do. Not in a direct day-to-day sense. When I’m doing calculations in quantum physics I am fully focused on the technical details. But the insights of modern physics— overturning previous conceptions of space, time, matter, energy, and reality itself— reframe discussions of life and death, of consciousness and free will, of duration and permanence. The poet and physicist speak a different language but care deeply about the same things. Though shaped by the rigors of science, my book aims to illuminate this common ground. 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." 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.

It is likely that you don't consider yourself to be a steam engine or perhaps even a physical contraption. I, too, only rarely use those terms to describe myself." ~ Brian Greene Accessible and illuminating . . .Curious readers . . . will be richly rewarded by [Greene’s] fascinating exploration.”

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You may ask, 'How then did organized things like stars, planets, bacteria, rhododendrons, dogs, humans, etc. come to be'? Chapter Seven (Brains and Belief) discusses our inner world and the development of religious beliefs. 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. 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:

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

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It is interesting that the evolutionary perspective doesn’t need to weigh-in on that question. Something can be adaptively useful whether or not it is true. For me what’s more important are the evolutionary and cultural roles that religions have played and continue to play. For the storyline I develop in the book, religions are valuable not because they provide insight into the factual nature of the physical world but because of their role in human development. Chapter Ten (The Twilight of Time) discusses the inevitability that time as we know and experience it will eventually end.