Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene (PDF)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A captivating exploration of deep time and humanity’s search for purpose, from the world-renowned physicist and best-selling author of The Elegant Universe.”Few humans share Greene’s mastery of both the latest cosmological science and English prose.” —The New York Times Until the End of Time is Brian Greene’s breathtaking new exploration of the cosmos and our quest to find meaning in the face of this vast expanse. Greene takes us on a journey from the big bang to the end of time, exploring how lasting structures formed, how life and mind emerged, and how we grapple with our existence through narrative, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and a deep longing for the eternal. From particles to planets, consciousness to creativity, matter to meaning—Brian Greene allows us all to grasp and appreciate our fleeting but utterly exquisite moment in the cosmos.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐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.”

⭐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.

⭐As someone with a background in astrophysics, I had hoped for something deep and thoughtful. Perhaps my familiarity with the topics has bred contempt, but I found this book at times to be poignant and deep and at other times tedious and slightly vacuous. There is FAR too much quoting other thinkers, to the extent that it seems that the author, a prodigious intellect in his own right, is attempting to impress us with the breadth of his knowledge. Unfortunately it comes across as the exact opposite – often superficial. And some of the thinking of modern physics I’m afraid is just nonsense masquerading as deep intellectual thought – read the sections on “Boltzmann Brains” and “Infinite multiverses in infinite space”. Any cursory mathematical analysis would probably disintegrate some of this and I wish the author would be more discriminatory or critical at times. Normally I devour books such as this in a matter of hours but after an initial burst of enthusiasm found this difficult to read and had to skim finish. Took me months as I struggled to generate the enthusiasm to continue, even in lock-down.

⭐This is an introspective and inspirational humanist story of how consciousness arose, the meaning it gives us, and its prospects for continued existence in the universe. It’s a surprisingly easy read despite its length, thanks to Greene’s conversational tone, focus on a few important scientific concepts throughout and frequent reference to episodes from his life and the great works of human culture, from Bach to the Hitchhiker’s Guide.The opening third or so of the book is well-written pop-sci exploring the familiar topics of how the universe, solar system, Earth and complex life came in to existence. The “entropic two-step”, as Greene puts it, is the driving force here, coupled to evolution, and after careful and lucid introductions these two themes recur and are developed throughout the rest of the book. Although I knew the broad strokes from umpteen other popular accounts, I was pleasantly surprised at the number of important recent developments and discoveries cited here, such as zircon time capsules implying a wet early Earth.The book then gets to grips with the nature of consciousness and free will, how human language and culture arose, and how we face the inevitability of our own demise. That’s a lot, but Greene doesn’t overplay his hand: he brings up competing theories even-handedly with the appropriate caveats, looks at how they relate to our finite lifespans, and explains his humanist perspective on it all. It’s heady and thought-provoking, and if the idea of a deterministic universe fills you with existential ennui some of it may actually be quite comforting. The end-notes for this part of the book are incidentally well worth a read, full of strict epistemology and the philosophy of science.The final section of the book melds the two tones, taking a sprint up in to the far future, considering whether the universe can support thought indefinitely, and discussing the implications for the human outlook if it can’t. There are a lot of fun surprises here, and even Greene’s takes on topics I already understood were thoroughly engaging. (The existential and intellectual befuddlement that drips off the page as he gets to Boltzmann brains is really relatable.) The news isn’t necessarily great for those seeking any sort of immortality, but as Greene discusses in the final chapter, there is an inherent value in our internal lives that goes beyond their mark on the cosmos.Cosmology and physics intrigue us because of their deep implications for our origins, nature, and fate. Weaving together the facts and the fascination, “Until the End of Time” offers us a chance to reflect deeply on how we respond to the universe as we discover ever more about it.

⭐I’ve heard the author speak so eloquently about many subjects which is why I bought this book, but, for some reason, I find his writing style really difficult to follow (and I have a PhD in Neuroscience!). I even bought the audiobook in the hope his delivery would make it easier to follow, but even that was too dense for me to follow. Perhaps I need to be in the right mood for this and that mood hasn’t enveloped me for some time. This is on my shelf and one day, I’ll try it again!

⭐I have no idea whether Greene is the great acclaimed scientist that’s claimed. I might have stayed with this book longer if I hadn’t got very irritated by his style. Listen to this:”But how does this relate to Russell’s vision of the future, his prognostication of the universe crawling toward death? Good question. Hang tight. We’re getting there. But we still have a couple of steps to go. ” That’s from page 22I don’t want someone having a chat with me; I want masterful scientific understanding related and made clear.I nearly gave up after Chapter 1, but I then realised that Chapter 1 is meant as an introduction.Maybe this is a book for those who haven’t done school physics. Someone obviously likes it, because it’s been reviewed with 5* by some.I gave up after Chapter 2, but even then, I found myself skipping the cotton wool.

⭐I have read a great deal. This is the most interesting, inspiring and exciting book I think I have ever read. Thank you so much!

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