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

by Brian Greene

The unfolding of any given life is beyond prediction. The final fate of any given life is a foregone conclusion.

Planets and stars and solar systems and galaxies and even black holes are transitory. The end of each is driven by its own distinctive combination of physical processes, spanning quantum mechanics through general relativity, ultimately yielding a mist of particles drifting through a cold and quiet cosmos.

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 significance, are those of our own making. In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.

Large groups often display statistical regularities absent at the level of the individual.

For now, the lesson is simply that low-entropy configurations should be viewed as a diagnostic, a clue that powerful organizing influences may be responsible for the order we’ve encountered.

whereas the first law of thermodynamics declares that the quantity of energy is conserved over time, the second law declares that the quality of that energy deteriorates over time.

Why then is the future different from the past? The answer, apparent from what we’ve now developed, is that the energy powering the future is of lower quality than that powering the past. The future has higher entropy than the past.

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.

Seeking relief from the discomfort, some researchers rely on a simple observation: if you wait long enough even the most unlikely of things will happen.

Gravity results in some molecules being pulled into a hotter, denser core, while others drift outward into a cooler, more diffuse shell that surrounds it.

After all, the more finely you examine something that’s alive, the more challenging it is to see that it’s living. Concentrate on a single molecule of water, an atom of hydrogen, or an individual electron, and you will find that none bear any mark delineating whether they are a constituent of something living or dead, of something animate or inanimate.

Life is recognizable from the collective behavior, the large-scale organization, the overarching coordination of an enormous number of particulate constituents—even a single cell contains more than a trillion atoms. Seeking insight into life by homing in on fundamental particles is akin to experiencing a Beethoven symphony instrument by instrument, note by single note.

The example illustrates a simple but widely relevant realization: the questions we ask determine the stories that provide the most useful answers.

Fused in stars and ejected in supernova explosions, or jettisoned by stellar collisions and amalgamated in particle plumes, an assortment of atomic species float through space, where they swirl together and coalesce into large clouds of gas, which over yet more time clump anew into stars and planets, and ultimately into us. Such is the origin of the ingredients constituting anything and everything you have ever encountered.

Newton based his equations on the world he could see. A couple of hundred years later, we learned that there is an unexpected reality beyond the reach of our frail human perceptions.

Members of a given species mostly share the same sequence of letters. For humans, the DNA sequence runs about three billion letters long, with your sequence differing from that of Albert Einstein or Marie Curie or William Shakespeare or anyone else by less than about a quarter of a percent, roughly one letter out of every string of five hundred.

Energy is the coin that pays for all comings and goings throughout the cosmos, a coin minted in a wide range of currencies and earned through an even wider range of callings.

In this sense, the processes of life are molecular meanderings fully described by physical law that simultaneously tell a higher-level, information-based story.

Life is physics orchestrated.

Reviving panpsychist beliefs, whose historical roots reach as far back as ancient Greece, Chalmers thus entertains the possibility that consciousness is relevant to anything and everything made of particles, whether a bat’s brain or a baseball bat.

A complete theory of physics would need to embrace not just outer but also inner information and would need laws that describe the dynamic evolution of each type. The processing of inner information would provide the physical basis of conscious experience.

Brains that survived are brains that avoided being consumed by details that lacked survival value.

am free not because I can supersede physical law, but because my prodigious internal organization has emancipated my behavioral responses.

Mathematics is the articulation of pattern. Using a handful of symbols we can encapsulate pattern with economy and precision.

How else, the reasoning goes, could children, subject to the haphazard, fragmented, and freewheeling linguistic assault of daily life, possibly internalize a wealth of precise grammatical constructs and rules other than by possessing a formidable mental arsenal standing at the ready to process the verbal onslaught? And because any child can learn any language, the mental arsenal cannot be language-specific; the mind must be able to latch on to a universal core common to all languages.

With math we commune with other realities; with story we commune with other minds.

We take in the world through our senses, and in pursuing coherence and envisioning possibility we seek patterns, we invent patterns, and we imagine patterns.

Sometime in the far future, if we finally play host to visitors from a distant world, our scientific narratives will contain truths they will have likely discovered too, and so will have little to offer. Our human narratives, as with Picard and the Tamarians, will tell them who we are.

That we are a minor planet orbiting an average star formed in the aftermath of a stupendous swelling of primordial space is a realization that constantly informs my thoughts regarding how we fit into the grand picture. That time elapses at a different rate for me than it does for anyone else who is not moving precisely with me is a stunning fact that I reflect on endlessly. That our apparently three-dimensional reality may be a thin slice through a grander spatial expanse is a thrilling possibility that I delight in imagining.

Language unleashes the cognitive capacity to imagine all manner of unrehearsed combinations that guide us toward novelty.

To survive is to kindle the search for why survival matters.

Clearly, there is as yet no consensus on why religion arose nor on why it has so tenaciously remained. And not for lack of ideas: coopting the naturally selected brain, driving group cohesion, calming existential anxiety, protecting reputations and reproductive opportunities.

The world is full of pronouncements that can guide how we behave. Those stories and pronouncements that are bound into a religious doctrine are elevated above all others because in the mind of the faithful they elicit some variety of belief.

influences. In short, the capacity for recognizing pattern is how we survive.

As long as a purported god’s influence does not in any way modify the progression of reality that is well described by our mathematical laws, then that God is compatible with all we observe.

The human mind thus relentlessly interprets an objective reality by producing a subjective one.

Beauty, in this analysis of sexual selection, is a good deal more than skin-deep. Beauty amounts to publicly available credentials attesting to a potential mate’s adaptive fitness.

Underlying such speculation is the assumption that life and mind are not dependent on any particular physical substrate, such as cells, bodies, and brains, but are instead collections of integrated processes.

flash. We therefore advise the Thinker to follow the universe’s lead: as time goes by, the Thinker should continually lower its temperature, slow down its thinking, and decrease the rate at which it consumes the universe’s diminishing supply of quality energy.

And, of course, if the universe is eternal, any duration, however long, registers as infinitesimal.

To me, the future that science now envisions highlights how our moment of thought, our instant of light, is at once rare, wondrous, and precious.

The math shows that the radius of the event horizon is proportional to the mass of the black hole: less mass entails a smaller horizon, more mass a larger horizon. When you throw something in, the black hole’s mass increases, and so you should picture its horizon swelling outward in response. The black hole eats and its spherical waist widens.

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.

unlikely. It is a cosmic version of dust to dust, with the early dust primed to dance the entropic two-step, being driven by gravity into orderly astronomical structures, while the later dust, spread so thinly, will be content to drift quietly through the void.

Hence the puzzle: the analysis revealed that the same mathematical symmetry that ensures healthy equations also requires massless particles (perhaps not surprising, as zero is itself a highly symmetric number, holding firm to its value when multiplied or divided by any other number).

Higgs was suggesting that if space were truly empty in the conventional and intuitive sense, particles would have no mass at all. He thus concluded that space must not be empty, and the peculiar substance it harbors must be just right for imbuing particles with their evident mass.

And a nonzero probability, however small, means that by waiting long enough, sooner or later the electron will make it to the other side. Observations confirm that it does. Such a transit through a barrier is what we mean by “quantum tunneling.”

All of this is based on a curious fact: everything you know reflects thoughts, memories, and sensations that currently reside in your brain.

Once again, however rare a process, over arbitrarily long durations it will happen arbitrarily many times.

If you then ask yourself for the most likely way that you acquired the beliefs, memories, knowledge, and understanding that you currently hold, the dispassionate answer based on sheer population size is clear: your brain just spontaneously formed from particles in the void, with all of its memories and other neuropsychological qualities imprinted through the particular configuration of the particles. The story you told of how you came to be is touching but false. Your memories and the various chains of reasoning that have led to your knowledge and your beliefs are all fictitious. You do not have a past. You have just come into existence as a disembodied brain endowed with thoughts and memories of things that never happened.25