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

by Brian Greene

Some 13.8 billion years ago, within ferociously swelling space, the energy contained in a tiny but ordered cloud of inflaton field disintegrated, shutting off repulsive gravity, filling space with a bath of particles, and seeding the synthesis of the simplest atomic nuclei. Where quantum uncertainty rendered the density of the bath slightly higher, the gravitational pull was slightly stronger, enticing particles to fall together in ever-growing clumps, forming stars, planets, moons, and other heavenly bodies. Fusion within stars, as well as rare but powerful stellar collisions, melded simple nuclei into more complex atomic species, which, upon raining down on at least one planet in the making, were coaxed by molecular Darwinism to assemble into arrangements capable of self-replication. Random variations of the arrangements that happened to abet molecular fecundity spread widely. And among these were molecular pathways for extracting, storing, and dispersing information and energy—the rudimentary processes of life—which, through the long haul of Darwinian evolution, became increasingly refined. In time, complex, self-directed, living beings emerged.