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

by Brian Greene

coalesce

Hyades star cluster

paroxysms

contorted

quiescent

ravenous

As we humans explore, we most certainly get some things—well, many things—flat-out wrong.

Our entire chain of reasoning is forged in optimism. In a universe that may lack everything from stars and planets right down to molecules and atoms, we’ve assumed that the Thinker can exist.

awaiting Godot, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

madcap

evanescent,

nebulous

Bekenstein bucked up the second law, allowing it once again to walk with its head held high.

comingling

Hawking’s analysis not only confirmed Bekenstein’s, but also revealed complementary surprises: black holes have a temperature and black holes glow.

They radiate. Black holes are black in name only. Or, said more precisely, black holes are black only if you ignore quantum physics.

particles and their antiparticle partners popping into existence in otherwise empty space.

The reason is that quantum mechanics also dictates that such particle-antiparticle pairs quickly find each other, annihilate and fade back into empty space.

ephemeral

Hawking realized that on occasion they will not annihilate.

bereft

momentum), turns tail and rushes outward. With this happening repeatedly in every tiny region of space all along the surface of the black hole’s spherical horizon, the black hole will appear to radiate particles in all directions, what we now call Hawking radiation.

balmy,

What happens when the black hole is almost gone, when its mass nears zero and its temperature soars toward infinity? Does it explode? Does it fizzle? Something else? We don’t know.

Oort

batty.

countenance

Higgs envisioned that space is filled with an invisible substance, now called the Higgs field,

certitude

When two particles, say two protons, slam together at high speed, the collision should jiggle the surrounding Higgs field. On occasion, this would theoretically knock free a tiny droplet of the field, which would show up as a new type of elementary particle—a Higgs particle—what Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek calls a “chip off the old vacuum.”

hemmed

Sometimes the electron disappears from the trap and rematerializes outside it.

Whether in honor or reproach, I don’t know which, such hypothetical, free-floating, untethered minds formed by the rare but possible spontaneous coming together of particles into a special, highly ordered configuration have become known as Boltzmann brains.20

anew.

cerebrate