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

by Brian Greene

the lesson is simply that low-entropy configurations should be viewed as a diagnostic, a clue that powerful organizing influences may be responsible for the order we’ve encountered.

I call it the entropic two-step, by which I mean any process in which the entropy of a system decreases because it shifts a more than compensating increase in entropy to the environment. The two-step ensures that even though entropy may decrease here it will increase there, securing the net entropic increase we expect based on the second law.

In the mid-1920s, Jesuit priest Georges Lemaître used Einstein’s newly minted description of gravity—the general theory of relativity—to develop the radical idea of a cosmos that began with a bang and has been expanding ever since.

Some fourteen billion years ago, the entire observable universe—all that we can see using the most powerful telescopes imaginable—was compressed into a stupendously hot, incredibly dense nugget, which then rapidly expanded. Cooling as it swelled, particles gradually slowed their frenzied motion and aggregated into clumps, which over time formed stars, planets, all manner of gaseous and rocky debris scattered across space—and us.

More often than not, physicists are reductionists and so tend to look beneath complex phenomena for explanations that rely on properties and interactions of simpler constituents.

Robert

Life is recognizable from the collective behavior, the large-scale organization, the overarching coordination of an enormous number of particulate constituents—even a single cell contains more than a trillion atoms.

Proteins are built from combinations of twenty smaller subunits, amino acids, similar to the way English words arise from various combinations of twenty-six letters.

The sheer number of ways that twenty distinct amino acids can be linked in a long chain makes this evident: for a chain with one hundred and fifty amino acids (a small protein), there are about 10195 different arrangements,

Groups of three consecutive letters on a given rail of DNA denote one particular amino acid from the collection of twenty.26 For example, the sequence CTA denotes the amino acid leucine; the sequence GCT denotes another, alanine; the sequence GTT denotes valine; and so on.

Sunlight striking chlorophyll in the green leaves of plants strips electrons from water molecules, pumps up their energy, and sets them off on a similar energy-extracting redox cascade.

Your body contains tens of trillions of cells, which means that every second you consume on the order of one hundred million trillion (1020) ATP molecules.

twenty-five-hundred-year-old sentiment of Democritus, “Sweet is sweet, bitter is bitter, hot is hot, cold is cold, color is color; but in truth there are only atoms and the void.”