Until the End of Time

“In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.”

Brian Greene's central thesis to this book is that: everything in this universe (and in fact the universe itself) is transitory, so let's examine this somewhat miraculous phenomenon that is us, springing up for what would be less than a blink of an eye in the cosmic timeline, and examining ourselves, the universe around us, and then - most probably - to fade into oblivion once again.

I love that. Sure, it fills one with existential dread, but this is why I love reading astrophysics. I love reading about our insignificance in the cosmic scale, not because I want to bask in how life is so meaningless, but because I like that recognition that we assign meaning to our lives because the universe is so completely apathetic and will rise and fall with or without us.

Greene's writing can be a little heavy-going at times, but his analogies can be spot-on. I thoroughly enjoyed the “drop a bag of pennies on a table” analogy in Ch 3 to explain entropy, as well as the “if every floor of the Empire State Building was an exponential increase in number of years since the Big Bang” analogy to really drive home the vastness of the cosmic timescale that we're looking at (the Sun would fizzle out by level 10).

The only thing that dropped this book down a star is probably the middle chapters, around Ch 4-8 where Greene delves more into anthropology and into subjects like language, story-telling, arts, religion, music, etc. to think about how and why humans evolved in this way. That's fine and all but I guess I wasn't here for subjects like that. While I did eventually make it through those chapters, I wasn't really sure overall how it contributed to his thesis.

Nevertheless, the first few and last few chapters centering on Greene's expertise of astrophysics were particularly stellar. It introduced concepts to me that I had never know about, like Boltzmann brains, and the ever present possibility of complete annihilation of all matter by a shifting of the Higgs field. It helped me get a better grasp on concepts I had heard of before but never quite understood, like Hawking radiation, the heat death of the universe, and even something fundamental like what entropy really is. His “entropic two-step” really helped me understand just how stars form, and why their formation doesn't necessarily decrease overall entropy in the universe.

Overall, this book was a thoroughly enjoyable read and I'm looking forward to exploring some of his other more astrophysics-focused titles in the future.