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

by Brian Greene

“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

And with that, having considered cosmic origins, explored the formation of atoms, stars, and planets, and swept across the emergence of life, consciousness, and culture, we will cast our sights toward the very realm that for millennia, literally and symbolically, has both stimulated and quelled our cosmic anxiety. We will look, that is, from here to eternity.

Nabokov’s description of a human life as a “brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”6 may apply to the phenomenon of life itself.

We are the product of a long lineage that has soothed its existential discomfort by envisioning that we leave a mark. And the more lasting the mark, the more indelible its imprint, the more a life seems to be a life that mattered.

Much as you know the implications of Newtonian physics in your bones—you can quickly grab a falling glass, instantly intuiting its Newtonian trajectory—you’d know quantum physics in your bones too. But lacking such quantum intuition, we rely on experiment and mathematics to mold our understanding by portraying aspects of reality we can’t directly experience.

Take a moment to let this sink in. Physicists describe the earliest moments of the universe using Einstein’s equations, updated to include Guth’s hypothetical energy field filling space, subject to the quantum uncertainty we learned from Heisenberg. Mathematical analyses of the inflationary burst then reveal that it should have left an indelible imprint, a fossil of creation in the form of a specific pattern of minute temperature variations across the night sky. Sophisticated space-based thermometers built nearly fourteen billion years later by a species just coming of scientific age here in the Milky Way have now detected precisely that pattern.