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

It is not typical for me to purchase the latest science book. But the New York Times review (a love letter to the ephemeral cosmic moment when everything is possible) caught my attention. Now, having been unable to put the book down, I can say it is thoroughly thrilling and not to be missed. There is a great deal of science covered, but I would not even categorize this as a science book. Greene has come forward with a deeply felt (and deeply moving) meditation on the human condition and has placed this meditation within the ultimate cosmic settingthe development of the universe starting at the big bang and reaching all the way out to timescales of the extremely far future. Developing two overarching themes in which evolution tends to create order while entropy tends to degrade it, the book explores the origin of life, the mysteries of consciousness, the puzzles of free will, the nature of religious experience, the prevalence of creative expression, and inevitable disintegration of everything. Heavy stuff for sure, but Greenes lyrical writing lightens the load, and his interjection of personal moments adds a human quality that transforms the journey into personal reflection that, at one and the same moment, has a universal appeal. The concepts are not watered down so various sections require focused attention, but Greene holds your hand the whole way, acting as a generous guide to some of the most heady of ideas. I will be thinking about these ideas for a long time to come.

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT: “The purpose of this book is to provide clarity. We will journey across time, from our most refined understanding of the beginning to the closest science can take us to the very end. We will explore how life and mind emerge from the initial chaos, and we will dwell on what a collection of curious, passionate, anxious, self-reflective, inventive, and skeptical minds do, especially when they notice their own mortality. We will examine the rise of religion, the urge of creative expression, the ascent of science, the quest for truth, and the longing for the timeless. The deep-seated affinity for something permanent will then propel our continued march toward the distant future, allowing us to assess the prospects for everything we hold dear, everything constituting reality as we know it, from planets ands stars, galaxies and black holes, to life and mind. Across it all, the human spirit of discover will shine through.

I was excited to read this book. I liked its subtitle and description; they spoke to me. But the book didnt. So much science! I found it largely inaccessible. It was not only a challenging read, it was slightly too challenging. I am not a science nerd, and explanations of scientific concepts frequently went sailing right over my head. Concepts seemed just beyond my understanding, just out of reach. As you might guess, eventually I gave up; I just wasnt getting anything out of it.

Well written. Articulate. Erudite. Complex. Overwhelming.

BOTTOM LINE: While the subject matter is broadly appealing, in reality this book is best read by those with a real affinity for science.

It cant be said that Brian Greene doesnt aim high in Until the End of Time. In some three hundred pages he tries to explain the Big Bang, cosmic evolution, stellar formation, the beginnings of life, the beginnings of consciousness, the role of art and religion in civilization and the ultimate fate of the universe. Quite a story!

As an explainer of complex scientific theories, particularly physics, Greene is on a par with popularizing scientists like Richard Dawkins or Stephen Hawking. Of course, if you found a Brief History of Time incomprehensible then you are likely to find large parts of Until the End of Time similarly difficult. I had a bit of an edge as my undergraduate major was in physics.

Greene is also honest that many of the phenomena he tries to fashion as chapters in his story remain scientific enigma. He does a good job of reviewing competing theories of lifes origin, the evolutionary grounding of the arts, etc.

What I found hard to justify is the amount of space Greene devotes to speculations about the distant future of the universe. He seems to make the error in reasoning that since weve discovered laws of physics that seem to apply to objects billions of years old we can similarly apply these to what the universe will be like in billions of years.

The lacuna in this argument is that modern physics is only a century old. Most of the advances in cosmology are even more recent. Why should we think that a hundred year old discipline can make accurate predictions across uncountable eons in the future?

Astronomers like to point out that human civilization would be only a few seconds long if the history of the universe were condensed to a year. It seems rather myopic to not notice that modern physics is only tenths of a second long and that it will probably evolve in unfathomable ways in the next thousand years, let alone the next billion.

Because Greene spends so much of this book on this topic, even concluding the book with a call to create our own meanings because the universe will finally end in entropic coldness, this seems like a major flaw.

However, much of the book does communicate difficult scientific concepts to a lay audience in a way I could understand. Im glad I read the book and recommend it to others. I merely think a little humility about the possible developments in a century old human enterprise wouldve made much of the book a little more realistic and less like the outpourings of a wild imagination.

This is an introspective and inspirational humanist story of how consciousness arose, the meaning it gives us, and its prospects for continued existence in the universe. It’s a surprisingly easy read despite its length, thanks to Greene’s conversational tone, focus on a few important scientific concepts throughout and frequent reference to episodes from his life and the great works of human culture, from Bach to the Hitchhiker’s Guide.

The opening third or so of the book is well-written pop-sci exploring the familiar topics of how the universe, solar system, Earth and complex life came in to existence. The “entropic two-step”, as Greene puts it, is the driving force here, coupled to evolution, and after careful and lucid introductions these two themes recur and are developed throughout the rest of the book. Although I knew the broad strokes from umpteen other popular accounts, I was pleasantly surprised at the number of important recent developments and discoveries cited here, such as zircon time capsules implying a wet early Earth.

The book then gets to grips with the nature of consciousness and free will, how human language and culture arose, and how we face the inevitability of our own demise. That’s a lot, but Greene doesn’t overplay his hand: he brings up competing theories even-handedly with the appropriate caveats, looks at how they relate to our finite lifespans, and explains his humanist perspective on it all. It’s heady and thought-provoking, and if the idea of a deterministic universe fills you with existential ennui some of it may actually be quite comforting. The end-notes for this part of the book are incidentally well worth a read, full of strict epistemology and the philosophy of science.

The final section of the book melds the two tones, taking a sprint up in to the far future, considering whether the universe can support thought indefinitely, and discussing the implications for the human outlook if it can’t. There are a lot of fun surprises here, and even Greene’s takes on topics I already understood were thoroughly engaging. (The existential and intellectual befuddlement that drips off the page as he gets to Boltzmann brains is really relatable.) The news isn’t necessarily great for those seeking any sort of immortality, but as Greene discusses in the final chapter, there is an inherent value in our internal lives that goes beyond their mark on the cosmos.

Cosmology and physics intrigue us because of their deep implications for our origins, nature, and fate. Weaving together the facts and the fascination, “Until the End of Time” offers us a chance to reflect deeply on how we respond to the universe as we discover ever more about it.

As someone with a background in astrophysics, I had hoped for something deep and thoughtful. Perhaps my familiarity with the topics has bred contempt, but I found this book at times to be poignant and deep and at other times tedious and slightly vacuous. There is FAR too much quoting other thinkers, to the extent that it seems that the author, a prodigious intellect in his own right, is attempting to impress us with the breadth of his knowledge. Unfortunately it comes across as the exact opposite – often superficial. And some of the thinking of modern physics Im afraid is just nonsense masquerading as deep intellectual thought – read the sections on Boltzmann Brains and Infinite multiverses in infinite space. Any cursory mathematical analysis would probably disintegrate some of this and I wish the author would be more discriminatory or critical at times. Normally I devour books such as this in a matter of hours but after an initial burst of enthusiasm found this difficult to read and had to skim finish. Took me months as I struggled to generate the enthusiasm to continue, even in lock-down.

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