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

by Brian Greene

The deep-seated affinity for something permanent, for what Franz Kafka identified as our need for “something indestructible,”10 will then propel our continued march toward the distant future, allowing us to assess the prospects for everything we hold dear, everything constituting reality as we know it, from planets and stars, galaxies and black holes, to life and mind. Across it all, the human spirit of discovery will shine through. We are ambitious explorers seeking to grasp a vast reality. Centuries of effort have illuminated dark terrains of matter, mind, and the cosmos. During millennia to come, the spheres of illumination will grow larger and brighter. The journey so far has already made evident that reality is governed by mathematical laws that are indifferent to codes of conduct, standards of beauty, needs for companionship, longings for understanding, and quests for purpose. Yet, through language and story, art and myth, religion and science, we have harnessed our small part of the dispassionate, relentless, mechanical unfolding of the cosmos to give voice to our pervasive need for coherence and value and meaning. It is an exquisite but temporary contribution. As our trek across time will make clear, life is likely transient, and all understanding that arose with its emergence will almost certainly dissolve with its conclusion. Nothing is permanent. Nothing is absolute. And so, in the search for value and purpose, the only insights of relevance, the only answers of...