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

by Brian Greene

Though governed by elegant mathematical laws that allow for all manner of wondrous physical processes, the universe will play host to life and mind only temporarily. If you take that in fully, envisioning a future bereft of stars and planets and things that think, your regard for our era can appreciate toward reverence. And that is the feeling I had experienced at Starbucks. The calm and connection marked a shift from grasping for a receding future to the feeling of inhabiting a breathtaking if transient present. It was a shift, for me, compelled by a cosmological counterpart to the guidance offered through the ages by poets and philosophers, writers and artists, spiritual sages and mindfulness teachers, among countless others who tell us the simple but surprisingly subtle truth that life is in the here and now. It’s a mind-set that is hard to maintain but one that has infused the thinking of many. We see it in Emily Dickinson’s “Forever—is composed of Nows”8 and Thoreau’s “eternity in each moment.”9 It is a perspective, I’ve found, that becomes all the more palpable when we immerse ourselves in the full expanse of time—beginning to end—a cosmological backdrop that provides unmatched clarity on how singular and fleeting the here and now actually is. The purpose of this book is to provide that clarity.