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

But what drives us to seek the timeless, to search for qualities that may last forever? Perhaps it all comes from our singular awareness that we are anything but timeless, that our lives are anything but forever.

The artist, in Rank’s assessment, is someone whose “creative impulse…attempts to turn ephemeral life into personal immortality.”4 Jean-Paul Sartre went farther, noting that life itself is drained of meaning “when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.”5 The suggestion, then, threading its way through these and other thinkers who followed, is that much of human culture—from artistic exploration to scientific discovery—is driven by life reflecting on the finite nature of life.

emerge from laws that, as far as we can tell, are timeless, and yet we exist for the briefest moment of time. We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws that seem not to require an underlying rationale, and yet we persistently seek meaning and purpose.

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

1 To work and play, to yearn and strive, to long and love, all of it stitching us ever more tightly into the tapestry of the lives we share, and for it all then to be gone—well, to paraphrase Steven Wright, it’s enough to scare you half to death. Twice.

we are impelled by such awareness to deny death the capacity to erase us.

“We fly to Beauty,” said Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.”

Eternity itself may forever lie beyond the reach of our equations, but our analyses have already revealed that the universe we have come to know is transitory.

Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment.

We are a species that delights in story. We look out on reality, we grasp patterns, and we join them into narratives that can captivate, inform, startle, amuse, and thrill.

Neurons, information, thought, and awareness are essential for the story of mind—and with that the narratives proliferate: myth to religion, literature to philosophy, art to music, telling of humankind’s struggle for survival, will to understand, urge for expression, and search for meaning.

But the most straightforward reading suggests that life, and intelligent life in particular, is ephemeral.

We mourn our transience and take comfort in a symbolic transcendence, the legacy of having participated in the journey at all.

Emily Dickinson’s “Forever—is composed of Nows”8 and Thoreau’s “eternity in each moment.”

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.

The second law describes a fundamental characteristic inherent in all matter and energy, regardless of structure or form, whether animate or inanimate. The law reveals (loosely, again) that everything in the universe has an overwhelming tendency to run down, to degrade, to wither.

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

The distinction between past and future is at once basic and pivotal to human experience. We were born in the past. We will die in the future. In between, we witness innumerable happenings that unfold through a sequence of events that, if considered in reverse order, would appear absurd.

Low entropy means there are far fewer ways the given macrostate can be realized by its microscopic ingredients, and so such configurations are hard to come by, they’re unusual, they’re carefully arranged, they’re rare.

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.

The second law declares that over time there is an overwhelming tendency of entropy to increase. In colloquial terms, special configurations tend to evolve toward ordinary ones (your carefully pressed shirt becomes creased and wrinkled) or order tends to descend into disorder (your organized garage degenerates into a haphazard mess of tools, storage boxes, and sporting equipment).

Saying it yet more generally, if a physical system is not already in the highest-entropy state available, it is overwhelmingly likely that it will evolve toward it.

Before the explosion, we say that the dynamite’s energy is high quality: it’s concentrated and easy to access. After the explosion, we say that the energy is low quality: it’s spread out and difficult to utilize.

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. Or at least that is what Boltzmann proposed.

The laws thus ensure that physical processes that unfold in one temporal sequence can unfold in reverse. And since those very same laws govern everything, including the physical processes responsible for how entropy changes over time, it would indeed be curious, erroneous really, to find that those laws only allow entropy to increase. They don’t. All the entropically increasing processes you’ve experienced day in and day out during your entire life—from the mundane of a shattering glass to the profound of bodily aging—can happen in reverse. Entropy can decrease. It’s just ridiculously unlikely.

The simple yet vital point the sauté pan illustrates is that the second law’s dictum of entropy increase refers to the total entropy of a complete physical system, which necessarily includes everything with which the system interacts.

“afterglow of creation”

we are no closer to answering the question raised by Gottfried Leibniz—“Why is there something rather than nothing?”—than