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

by Brian Greene

one of the resident advisors suggested I take a look at Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. A German historian and philosopher, Spengler had an abiding interest in both mathematics and science, no doubt the very reason his book had been recommended. The aspects responsible for the book’s fame and scorn—predictions of political implosion, a veiled espousal of fascism—are deeply troubling and have since been used to support insidious ideologies, but I was too narrowly focused for any of this to register. Instead, I was intrigued by Spengler’s vision of an all-encompassing set of principles that would reveal hidden patterns playing out across disparate cultures, on par with the patterns articulated by calculus and Euclidean geometry that had transformed understanding in physics and mathematics.2 Spengler was talking my language. It was inspiring for a text on history to revere math and physics as a template for progress. But then came an observation that caught me thoroughly by surprise: “Man is the only being that knows death; all others become old, but with a consciousness wholly limited to the moment which must seem to them eternal,” knowledge that instills the “essentially human fear in the presence of death.” Spengler concluded that “every religion, every scientific investigation, every philosophy proceeds from it.”3