Until the End of Time Quotes

“But the gravitational attraction between two smaller things, like two electrons, is a million billion billion billion billion times weaker than their electromagnetic repulsion.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“For now, we will simply assume that one way or another, the early universe transitioned into this low-entropy, highly ordered configuration, sparking the bang and allowing us to declare that the rest is history.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“If entropy has been steadily increasing since the big bang, then the entropy back at the bang must have been much lower than it is today.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“In (highly) colloquial terms, the law declares that the production of waste is unavoidable.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Religion is not meant to explain the universe. It cannot replace scientific research.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“When a writer brings into language a new image that is fully right, what is knowable of existence expands.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“The sheer number of ways that twenty distinct amino acids can be linked in a long chain makes this evident: for a chain with one hundred and fifty amino acids (a small protein), there are about 10195 different arrangements, far larger than the number of particles in the observable universe.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Based on the composition of the sun—the quantities of various heavy elements it now contains, determined by spectroscopic measurements—solar physicists believe the sun is a grandchild of the universe’s first stars, a third-generation arrival.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“life is one more means the universe employs to release the entropy potential locked within matter.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“My intent here is to use that insight to grasp how a universe with ever-increasing entropy, destined for ever-greater disorder, creates a wealth of order along the way.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“One response, relied upon through the ages to address embryonic versions of such concerns, is that order is hewn from the chaos by a supreme intelligence. Human experience aligns with this anthropomorphically inspired turn.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Starbucks. The calm and connection marked a shift from grasping for a receding future to the feeling of inhabiting a breathtaking if transient present. It was a shift, for me, compelled by a cosmological counterpart to the guidance offered through the ages by poets and philosophers, writers and artists, spiritual sages and mindfulness teachers, among countless others who tell us the simple but surprisingly subtle truth that life is in the here and now. It’s”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“as if my own identity hardly matters because it has been subsumed by what I can only describe as a feeling of gratitude for the gift of experience.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“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,”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“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.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“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.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“By shaping our intuition and developing our cognitive skills, evolution initiated our education in physics but our more comprehensive understanding has emerged from the force of human curiosity expressed through the language of mathematics.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“turn the earth into a black hole you’d need to squeeze it down to about two centimeters across;”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“can envision a future when scientists will be able to provide a mathematically complete articulation of the fundamental microphysical processes underlying anything that happens, anywhere and anywhen.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“The art of science, of which Newton was the master, lies in making judicious simplifications that render problems tractable while retaining enough of their essence to ensure that the conclusions drawn are relevant.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Now, more often than not, contemplating the far future leaves me with a feeling of calm and connection, as if my own identity hardly matters because it has been subsumed by what I can only describe as a feeling of gratitude for the gift of experience”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Solving problems, learning how the universe is put together-that's what had always captivated me.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“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.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“Tononi’s proposal elevates these observations to a defining characterization: conscious awareness is information that is highly integrated and highly differentiated.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

“as Stephen Jay Gould summarized it, “A large brain allowed us to learn…the inevitability of our personal mortality”26 and “all religion began with an awareness of death.”
― Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe