I’ve mentioned this book several times over the years (it was published in 2020), most recently here in early June, when I sat down to read it all the way through. I finished in mid-July.
Subtitled: “Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe” (Knopf, Feb. 2020, xiii+428pp, including 102pp of acknowledgements, notes, bibliography, and index)
This is one of those big books about everything that I’m so fond of. It includes the human race in its journey from the beginning to the end of time, but only abstractly, via the ways humans have understood that history of time. A core concept of the book, as I mentioned in that earlier post, is the human propensity to perceive patterns and conceive them as stories. Furthermore, we’ve invented many nested stories to understand reality at various scales. See the quote in that previous post.
I think this won’t take as long to summarize here, as the previous book by Pinker did. Mostly because much of the content is already familiar, about the big bang and the history of the universe, and even the history of humanity. What’s unique about this book is how Greene lays these out as, well, a series of nested stories, thus illustrating his thesis. Along the way, though, there were some ideas new to me, in particular about the nature of the so-called ‘inflation’ that propelled the earliest history of the universe, just after the Big Bang. (In Chapter 3.)
\
Preface
Greene recalls a comment about how when you prove a mathematical theorem, it stands, forever, and sees that as the reason for his attraction to math and physics. And how he read in Spengler that awareness of death drives religion, science, and philosophy. So too perhaps art and much of human culture. It all derives from the value we place on permanence. Now we have tools of science to explore the complete panorama of time. And explore how life and mind in the universe also have limited life spans. And against that how we strive for meaning and purpose. It’s about recognizing our place in the larger cosmological story.
1, The Lure of Eternity: Beginnings, Endings, and Beyond, p3
In the fullness of time all that lives will die. Only humans seem to have noticed this. We try not to fixate on it. We commit to family or nation or religion; or we leave behind creative expressions; or by accumulating wealth or power. We fascinated with the timeless. And now science can tell the story both of the distant past, but also of the future—so that we know nothing is everlasting.
We are a species that delights in story. We construct narratives out of everything. There is no one story; there are many nested stories that probe different domains, different levels of reality. Physics, biology, the mind, and then the narratives of myth, religion, literature, philosophy, art, music. The stories are interlaced. Perhaps one day everything will be understood from basic principles; meanwhile we can appreciate these stories.
Two forces share leading roles in these stories. Entropy, and evolution. Evolution is a factor even before the emergence of life, in chemical combats of molecular Darwinism. Much understanding in this area has come in the past couple decades. Biological evolution followed; at some point life became aware, and aware of being aware. Work to understand the nature of consciousness goes on. Then comes human behavior: language and the telling of stories; stories that foreshadow religion; then further creative expression. In these areas Darwinian evolution applies to human behavior. Then comes cognition, and the awareness of the future, the understanding that we will die. … ( This section is essentially an outline of the book to follow. )
Information, Consciousness, and Eternity, p11. With very broad strokes we can predict the future of the universe with reasonable confidence. We like to suppose life of some kind will endure. Will thinking minds also endure? Presumably, when sufficient environmental conditions exist. However, planets and stars are transitory. Entropy may destroy thought. So intelligent life is likely ephemeral.
Reflections on the Future, p13. Such thoughts can have visceral impact. Death wipes you out. Thus perhaps the focus on questions that transcend the moment. A result is an appreciation of our era that borders on reverence. Life is the here and now. The purpose of this book is to provide that clarity. Nothing is permanent; the only answers of significance are those of our own making.
[[ Two notes: he explicitly cites Wilson’s ‘consilience’; and as noted before, these ‘nested stories’ echo Sean Carroll’s ‘poetic naturalism’ that uses different kinds of ‘stories’ to describe different levels of complexity, as noted in my review of his book. ]]
2, The Language of Time: Past, Future, and Change, p17
A discussion of entropy. The inefficiency of steam engines led to the second law of thermodynamics: waste is unavoidable. (And so universal death is inevitable.) Newton’s laws simplified internal structures, e.g. by understanding large groups of particles statistically. It’s a change of perspective (i.e. a move from one nested story to the next higher). The scientific conception of entropy is subtler than the popular notion. High entropy equates to messy arrangements (say, of 100 randomly tossed pennies); low entropy to orderly ones. The second law of thermodynamics isn’t a strict law; it’s probabilistic. We understand that entropy is overwhelmingly likely to increase moving toward the future. (Yet, how do complex systems evolve, like life on earth?) The way a system can decrease its entropy is by shifting an increase to the environment. Greene calls this “the entropic two-step,” and it’s a key point the recurs throughout the book. Page 41:
…by which I mean any process in which the entropy of a system decreases because it shifts a more than compensating increase in entropy to the environment. The two-step ensures than even through entropy may decrease here it will increase there, securing the net entropic increase we expect based on the second law.
Which is a way of explaining how apparent pockets of order, like stars and planets, and in particular life, can exist — but only temporarily, over the history of the universe. Can this go on forever? This is a key question. (But: no.)
(I’m trying to compress these summaries; my originals are here, commented out, though you can see them through Page Source.)
