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

by Brian Greene

Across hundreds of thousands of years, artistic endeavors may have been the playground of human cognition, providing a safe arena for training our imaginative capacities and infusing them with a potent faculty for innovation.

Innovation is the foot soldier of creativity. Group cohesion is the army of implementation. Success in the relentless battle for survival requires both: creative ideas that are successfully implemented. That the arts stand at the nexus of the two suggests an adaptive role beyond the mere pushing of pleasure buttons.

With this perspective the arts join language, story, myth, and religion as the means by which the human mind thinks symbolically, reasons counterfactually, imagines freely, and works collaboratively. Over the sweep of time, it is these capacities that have given rise to our culturally, scientifically, and technologically rich world.

You have your own list. We all do. Experiences that fully lock our attention and spark emotional responses we value even in the absence—or perhaps because of the absence—of a fully rational or linguistic description. What’s curious, although likely common, is that while my own working process is thoroughly language based, I feel no urge to explore these experiences in words. When I think of them, I feel no lack of understanding calling out for linguistic clarification. They expand my world without need for interpretation. These are the times that my inner narrator knows it’s time to take a break. An examined life need not be an articulated life.

As with life’s punctuated moments, we each can bring to mind works, whether in literature or film, sculpture or choreography, painting or music, that in one way or another have moved us. Through these captivating experiences, we consume “megadoses” of essential qualities of human life on this planet. But far from empty calories, these heightened encounters provide insights that would be difficult if not impossible to otherwise acquire.

Some twenty-five hundred years ago, the Greek lyric poet Sappho lamented the inevitability of change, “You, children, pursue the violet-laden Muses’ lovely gifts / and the clear-toned lyre so dear to song; / but for me—old age has now seized my once tender body,” tempered by reference to the cautionary tale of Tithonus, a mortal granted immortality by the gods but still subject to the ravages of age, now endured for eternity. A final line that some scholars believe to be the true ending of the poem—“Eros has granted to me the beauty and the brightness of the sun”—suggests that through her passionate pursuit of life, expressed through her poetry, Sappho anticipated transcending decay and achieving ageless radiance; through her poetry, she imagined attaining a symbolic immortality.

Time, for the most part, is a constant companion. Impermanence underlies experience. We revere the absolute but are bound to the transitory.

Much as specks of white paint stuck to a black swatch of spandex move apart when the spandex stretches, galaxies are, for the most part, stuck to the fabric of space and move apart because space swells. The more distant one galaxy is from another, the more intervening space there is between them to swell, and so the faster the galaxies will separate. Einstein’s law imposes no limit on the speed of such recession.

After months of meticulous analysis, checking and rechecking details of the purported gravitational disturbance, the researchers announced that a gravitational wave had indeed rolled by earth. What’s more, by precisely analyzing the twitch and comparing it with the results of supercomputer simulations of the gravitational waves that should be produced by various astronomical events, the researchers reverse-engineered the signal to determine the source. They concluded that 1.3 billion years ago, a time when multicellular life was just starting to coalesce on planet earth, two distant black holes were orbiting each other ever more closely and ever more quickly, closing in on the speed of light, until in a final orbital frenzy they smashed together. The collision generated a tidal wave in space, a gravitational tsunami so enormous that its power exceeded that produced by every star in every galaxy in the observable universe. The wave raced outward at the speed of light, in all directions, and so part headed toward earth, diluting in power as it spread ever more widely. About one hundred thousand years ago, as humans were migrating from the African savanna, the wave rippled through the dark matter halo surrounding the Milky Way galaxy as it continued its relentless sprint. About one hundred years ago, the wave raced past the Hyades star cluster and as it did, one member of our species, Albert Einstein, began to think about gravitational waves and wrote the first papers on the ...

Hawking revisited these quantum processes but now imagined them taking place just outside the event horizon of a black hole. When a particle-antiparticle pair pops into this environment, sometimes the two particles will annihilate quickly, just as they would anywhere else. But, and this is the point, Hawking realized that on occasion they will not annihilate. Sometimes one member of the pair will get sucked into the black hole. The surviving particle, now bereft of a partner with which to annihilate (and tasked with conserving total 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.

In the fullness of time, black holes will waste away too.

Particles and fields. Physical laws and initial conditions. To the depth of reality we have so far plumbed, there is no evidence for anything else. Particles and fields are the elementary ingredients. The physical laws prompted by the initial conditions dictate progression.

Particles and fields do what they do without concern for meaning or value or significance. Even when their indifferent mathematical progression yields life, physical laws maintain complete control. Life has no capacity to intercede or overrule or influence the laws. What life can do is facilitate groups of particles to act in concert and manifest collective behaviors that, compared to the inanimate world, are novel.

Add in language, and one such self-aware species rises above the needs of the moment to see itself as part of an unfolding from past to future. With that, winning the battle is no longer the only concern. We are no longer satisfied to merely survive. We want to know why survival is significant. We seek context. We search for relevance. We assign value. We judge behavior. We pursue meaning.

Not that we spring to our feet each morning wailing “Carpe diem!” but the deep-seated knowledge that there are just so many mornings when we will rise at all instills an intuitive calculus of value, one that would be very different in a world with unlimited do-overs. The explanations we give for the subjects we study, the trades we learn, the work we pursue, the risks we take, the partners we join, the families we build, the objectives we set, the concerns we entertain—all reflect the recognition that our opportunities are scarce because our time is limited.

A terminal prognosis affects people in different ways—focusing attention, providing perspective, stoking regret, fueling panic, delivering composure, inspiring epiphany. I anticipated that my own reaction would lie somewhere among these. But the prospect that earth and all of humankind would be wiped out triggered a different kind of reaction. The news would make everything seem rather pointless. Whereas my own impending end would heighten intensity, endowing with significance moments that might have otherwise receded into the daily humdrum, contemplating the end of the entire species seemed to do the opposite, yielding a sense of futility.

While immortality of the individual may sap significance, immortality of the species seems necessary to secure it.

We are ephemeral. We are evanescent. Yet our moment is rare and extraordinary, a recognition that allows us to make life’s impermanence and the scarcity of self-reflective awareness the basis for value and a foundation for gratitude.

I used to imagine that by studying the universe, by peeling it apart figuratively and literally, we would answer enough of the how questions to catch a glimpse of the answers to the whys. But the more we learn, the more that stance seems to face in the wrong direction. Looking for the universe to hug us, its transient conscious squatters, is understandable, but that’s just not what the universe does.

Science is a powerful, exquisite tool for grasping an external reality. But within that rubric, within that understanding, everything else is the human species contemplating itself, grasping what it needs to carry on, and telling a story that reverberates into the darkness, a story carved of sound and etched into silence, a story that, at its best, stirs the soul.