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

One of, if not the best book about reality, existence, and astronomy I've ever read. I love reading deep books about the nature of reality and everything science has helped us understand so far. This book is a full examination of our current understand of how reality is maybe working from the big bang to possible ends or cycles of the maybe infinite universe we find ourselves. Brian helps make things easy to understand and is not shy to give his own opinions and predictions on future discoveries. A fantastic pleasure to read and contemplate our place in the universe.

As someone well into their senior years my reading passions have spanned the topics from A to Z and from the scientific to the esoteric. Several years ago, I had read “The Elegant Universe” and enjoyed the book.This is why when I saw this 430-page hardcover edition (Until the end of time: Matter and our search for meaning in an evolving universe by Brian Greene) on Amazon I decided to purchase it.First off, you should be aware that this is not what you would call “a recreational read.” The author is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and in this volume, he explores some heavy scientific and intellectual topics.Even though he writes beautifully and makes his ideas come alive; nevertheless, this book reads like a college level textbook on physics and cosmology. In fact, there are 99 pages of detailed notes at the end of the book if you decide to do more research on the topics.The subjects covered in this huge book covers “The lure of eternity, the language of time, origins and entropy, information and vitality, particles and consciousness, language and story, brains and belief, instinct and creativity, duration and impermanence, the twilight of time and the nobility of being.”In conclusion, I enjoyed reading this book very much and recommend it to those who may have read his best seller (The elegant universe).Rating: 5 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Tactical principles of the most effective Combative Systems).

I previously read and enjoyed another of Greene’s books. He’s a wonderful writer for the lay reader. He did not disappoint here. What he does well, he did again. He wrote about physics.On the other hand, he wrote about more than that, too. He is witnessing many academic disciplines joining physics to create multi-disciplinary teams working to solve problems using new insights. In the spirit of working with other fields, he brought physics to the fight over whether man has free will. I have previously viewed this as a specifically religious debate. He tried to convince me here that this debate is about more than religion.He weighs in on the “con” position about man and free will: mankind is a collection of particles and particles in every case yet known have behaved consistently with the unchangeable increase in entropy over time.That argument failed with me. The physics he cited struck me as a long way from belonging in that discussion. I’m all for putting more areas of human achievement together for better solutions, but this too far a stretch. And 50 years ago, I wasn’t creative enough to hope for an implosion of the Soviet Union. So maybe I’m wrong here, too.An interesting work. Far more of it is physics than not; that material is wonderful. The other part is distraction. Well, it is for this one reader.

Brian Greene allows us into his private world, he’s brilliant, so it is a fun place to go and visit. In spite of being brilliant, he is not much different from us. For the love of pizza, when 10 years old, he blew up his mother’s kitchen (p. 57-58). Yes, brilliant but like all of us, he has moments of being stupid. His open and exposed approach makes me want to read on. He loves math and wants to go deep into physics. But beyond that shiny collegiate surface he also wants to go much deeper. His older brother has taken a spiritual path (dancing with Hare Krishna p. 203) but on some level he knows his path towards truth is not the same as his older brother.How does science then, without any beliefs get to the promised land? How does Brian find the inner peace that his brother is dancing to? Of course, it would take 428 pages. But to lay out what appears to me to be his approach, he heads toward the open state Tibetans call Samadhi, but he doesn’t use any religious language. Samadhi isn’t a normal state of thinking thoughts to find answers, but a state of open contemplation beyond thought. Brian does this by expanding your mind, one idea at a time until you become wide open. You get your mind blown. He does all this with wisdom. Wisdom is what happens to you as time takes place. You, as you get older become wise, just because you are older. Brian doesn’t call it wisdom, he only uses time itself, vast amounts of time, and as you contemplate these vast lengths of time, you naturally sense or feel outside of time. Consciousness can use intuition to do that but a strictly logical mind can’t think it. So Brian gives us time to contemplate, and he guards us from having any beliefs.Beliefs are a problem, because once you have a belief, you can’t do science, you can’t pretend to be open minded, you get stuck. Once you get stuck, you are susceptible to fascism. Fascism happens when you think there is only one way. Fascism is a large part of religion, politics, and science. Once we get stuck, we get really stuck.Here we are at the start of a world pandemic, with an idiot president pointing at his accomplishments. All of this reality, kind of helps us to read this wonderful book. A book to fight fascism, and to feel the universe giving us a personal hug. Yes, we can all enter Samadhi together.

I've read all of Brian Greene's books and they are always a mind-expanding experience. This one has less math than his others, and gets into subjects like morality and religion which are normally outside of a physicist's ken. As usual the writing is very entertaining and down to earth, not difficult to understand. His metaphor for long periods of time using the Empire State Building is quite useful. And like his last book, in which infinite space allows pretty much anything not logically impossible to exist (include not one, but infinite copies of ourselves and our own world), vast periods of time allow the improbable to become inevitable, including the random development of brains from patterns of particles, so-called Boltzmann brains. In fact, it is not easy to tell if our brains are in fact Boltzmann brains and our environment simply confabulated. This is the most mind-bending part of the book. But in the end the book is really about finding meaning from life knowing that we are simply masses of particles in particular patterns, doomed to die, just as the Universe someday is most likely to die as well. Along the way we stop briefly on the problem of consciousness, which discussion is unsatisfying as all discussions of consciousness inevitably are. Nevertheless this was an enlightening book. I have always loved books like this, ever since I was a boy and encountered George Gamow's 1 2 3 Infinity. I like the fundamental questions, even if the math and physics are far beyond me. Brian Greene excels at explaining the science at my level, and I appreciate that.

For anyone interested in Cosmology and the implications of modern physics, this is a must read. It is, in my mind, an important book that offers a clear understanding, given knowledge to date, of how it all developed and where it is all going. With that said, the book fails to emphasize the importance of TRANFORMATIONS in reality, although perhaps the author feels that the reader will automatically recognize these differences in “levels.” There are transformations from inanimate to living, from atoms to molecules to complex objects, from simpler life forms to conscious beings to community. To me, the author does an amazing job of describing those changes but does not highlight the significant change in the NATURE and QUALITY from one level to the next. Calling it all jiggling bundles of particles may be shortchanging reality. It seems important to sit in awe in recognition of these amazing transitions. The author also does not recognize the possibility of future findings that would be consistent with current understandings. There may exist an underlying, invisible, fabric, ground or field of connected energy throughout all of space/time, invisible like dark matter and gravitational waves. This "ground of being," so named by Paul Tillich, a Theologian, might connect all things into Oneness, including us as living beings and as disorganized particles that serve as fodder for insects after the time of death, uniting the singularity at the time of the Big Bang as well as our current organized universe. To me, it is important to recognize and celebrate the oneness of all things, originally a principle of Eastern religions, but seemingly consistent with the findings of modern physics. This idea does provide some meaning or context to life, implies an ethic, and suggests an immortality of sorts, connections unrecognized in the book.

This is an interesting but problematic book. Professor Greene is a physicist known for his work in string theory and his popularizations of very complex science. In this book he ventures into the world of philosophy and that may be a bridge too far. The title itself is descriptive of much of the book—an account of the manner in which time will end and, as David Gates put it, the stars will all go out. Fortunately that is not going to happen anytime soon. In fact, it will happen so far into the future that we require metaphors to give us even the barest sense of just how long that will take. The science of the process is fascinating and it is described at great length and as clearly as possible for a lay audience.The subtitle of the book is more problematic—mind, matter, and our search for meaning in an evolving universe. For Professor Greene the overarching drivers of 'meaning' are two—evolution and entropy, Darwin and the second law of thermodynamics. The first is a real problem. Despite the adulation of the neoDarwinians there are real issues with Darwinian theory. The most learned and articulate of the challengers is David Berlinski, whose work should be read in tandem with Professor Greene's. The gaps in the fossil record, the issues inherent in the Cambrian explosion and other matters challenge us to tread softly before embracing Darwin wholesale. The second part of the dyad—entropy—puts us on more steady ground and should doubtless be a pivotal part of our view of 'reality'.There are, however, other ways of thinking of these things. In the world of the humanities and the social sciences, e.g. (the world in which Professor Greene is, irrevocably, embedding himself) there are other dyads that could be suggested. In literary studies, for example, we have commonly opposed 'order' and 'energy'. There are traditions and challenges to tradition. In Paradise Lost God is order and Satan is energy. In literary history there is classicism on the one hand and romanticism on the other. In that most orderly of organizations there is the military 'uniform' but also General Patton's pearl-handled revolvers. General officers are permitted to express their energy and exuberance by making adjustments to their uniforms. There is a long tradition at West Point of cadets expressing their expertise through both standard military performance and exuberant, exceptional actions. Dougie MacArthur took a cannon from Trophy Point and put it on top of a building; how he did it remained a classroom problem in engineering courses. Caltech students do the most significant science imaginable but they also mess with the Hollywood sign. When one seeks meaning in a complex universe this dyad is quite useful. It gives us conservative/progressive; it gives us the past and possible futures.The key problem is that Professor Greene approaches the search for meaning on purely scientific terms, but as he notes (pp. 52-53, 68-69, 72, 116) science is as yet unable to answer Leibniz's question, why is there something rather than nothing? The 'profound questions' that abound (p. 53) include what or who created space and time and what or who imposed the guiding grip of mathematics, and what or who is responsible for there being anything at all. Schrödinger asked what is life, a problem on which science is still laboring, but the question of life's origin remains a mystery (p. 72). And "we have yet to articulate a robust scientific explanation of conscious experience" (p. 116).Wittgenstein taught us that philosophy is unable to answer the most important questions, but neither is science and philosophy has been trying for a very long time. I believe that Professor Greene does a very nice job of venturing into the world of the arts and humanities, given his academic specialty, but that land is vast. The subject of conscious experience, e.g., is daunting beyond belief, particularly from the point of view of wet neuroscience, but the arguments from dry neuroscience, from, e.g. Locke to Berkeley to Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein may provide a useful framework for exploring the problem.At the center of the book is the question of how we can cope with our own mortality and Professor Greene offers some interesting and informed answers, though he never offers the philosophic rejoinder that a universe that ultimately lacks meaning is something upon which we should vomit rather than agonize. He needs more Pascal, more Dostoevsky, more Samuel Johnson, more Wittgenstein. Most of all he needs to see that he has entrapped himself by asking ultimate questions while eliminating the obvious answer to many of them. He remains reverently agnostic and that is fine (unless you are writing a book that seeks ultimate meaning); then it is a significant challenge.

A condensed review of time universe and human purpose, this book can present you with a clarity of the human situation and point to the best life choices one can make.

Thanks for the tour of modern science.I liked the explaination for how all biological agents get energy from oxygen. Very detailed.I disagreed with the end bit about how conciousness is a product of atomic and material activity. But I liked how the author set out the argument and explained the plausibiblity.Thanks!

Brian Greene kan de meest complexe dingen op een boeiende meeslepende beeldende manier vertellen. Leest zeer vlot, en is extreem interessant! Aanrader!

Greene e' uno scrittore con una prosa ricca e precisa, unisce una vasta competenza scientifica specifica ad una vasta cultura filosofica e letteraria, esplora l'oggettivita' senza timore di esporre i propri punti di vista, offre una visione dell'umana complessità' che unisce la profondita'scientifica al bisogno delle narrative individuali che assumono rilevanza nel processo di selezione.

Pour tous ceux qui s'intéressent aux questions de la vie et la mort, de l'origine et la fin de l'univers, de l'homme, de l'intélligence, du cerveau, de la langue, de la créativité et du sens de la vie.

予定通り到着、品質も問題なし。