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

by Brian Greene

History has revealed that the expectations described in each of these tales were misguided. With two centuries of hindsight, the near-mystical enigma that life once conjured has diminished. Although we still lack a complete understanding of life’s origin, there is nearly universal scientific consensus that no magical spark is required. Particles configured into a hierarchy of structures—atoms, molecules, organelles, cells, tissues, and so on—are all that’s necessary. The evidence strongly favors the existing framework of physics, chemistry, and biology as being fully sufficient for explaining life. The hard problem of life, while surely difficult, has been reclassified as easy. For electricity and magnetism, data collected from careful experiments demanded that scientists go beyond the features of physical reality that were on the books prior to the 1800s. The existing understanding gave way to a wholly new physical quality of matter (electric charge) responding to a wholly new type of influence (space-filling electric and magnetic fields) described by a wholly new set of equations (twenty such equations in the initial formulation) developed by James Clerk Maxwell. Although solved, the “easy” problem of electricity and magnetism turned out to be hard.25