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

by Brian Greene

In Pinker’s view, the arts cut the feedback loops, sever adaptive benefits, and directly stimulate our pleasure centers, yielding gratifying experiences that from an evolutionary perspective are unearned.

From the standpoint of survival, the arts are junk food.

music is an auditory parasite, free riding on emotionally evocative aural sensitivities

music hijacks such sonic sensitivity and takes it for a joyride of sensual pleasure that confers no adaptive value.

minds that reason with analogy and metaphor, minds that represent with color and texture, minds that imagine with melody and rhythm are minds that cultivate a more flourishing cognitive landscape.

Innovation is the foot soldier of creativity.

reasons counterfactually,

This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive.”

“Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.”

thinking is intellectual, feeling is emotional,

“The only true voyage of discovery,” he once said, “would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others.”

The examined life examines death.

to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral.”

I don’t mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think”

Space is expanding, but the rate of expansion must be decreasing.

accelerated expansion the astronomers observe,

dark energy’s push simply needs to exceed the galaxies’ collective pull.

But space contains a lot of cubic meters.

Reality started with a bang, and sometime before we reach the eleventh floor, one hundred billion years since the big bang, it may end with a rip.

The ubiquitous astronomical order manifested in solar systems and galaxies will have dissolved; these structures, now pervasive, will have become patterns that the universe has retired.

described the disappointing experiments as “being slapped down by nature,” an experience, he added, that turned him against the whole program of unification.

Aristotle’s entelechial description of motion or Empedocles’s fire-in-the-eye theory of vision.

optimism, rational and tempered,

destined to fail in this indispensable task of entropy disposal, the future of thought itself will be imperiled.

comingling of three concepts: thought, entropy, and heat.

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

Quantum mechanics is a particular sort of starry-eyed dreamer,

The only novelty is that we notice.

“no one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men…I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.”

“Which news would affect you more,” she asked, “being told you have a year to live or that in a year earth will be destroyed?”