Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time

In February, just before the world changed, renowned physicist Brian Greene joined Pioneer Works director of sciences Janna Levin (author of Black Hole Blues) for a public discussion of his new book, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. The hour-and-a-half discussion included topics as far ranging as the Big Bang and string theory to consciousness and Boltzmann brains. They discuss making life from scratch, entropy, and of course the end of the universe. Pioneer Works has kindly released the recording of that evening, and I can’t recommend it enough.

It is worth browsing all of Brian Greene’s titles:

2020: Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

 

Greene takes us on a journey from the big bang to the end of time, exploring how lasting structures formed, how life and mind emerged, and how we grapple with our existence through narrative, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and a deep longing for the eternal. From particles to planets, consciousness to creativity, matter to meaning—Brian Greene allows us all to grasp and appreciate our fleeting but utterly exquisite moment in the cosmos.

Shop: Half Price Books 

2011: The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

 

Briane Greene takes us on an adventure to a multiverse comprising an endless series of big bangs, a multiverse with duplicates of every one of us, a multiverse populated by vast sheets of spacetime, a multiverse in which all we consider real are holographic illusions, and even a multiverse made purely of math–and reveals the reality hidden within each.

Shop: Half Price Books

 

2004: The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

 

From Newton’s unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein’s fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics’ entangled arena where vastly distant objects can bridge their spatial separation to instantaneously coordinate their behavior or even undergo teleportation, Greene reveals our world to be very different from what common experience leads us to believe. Focusing on the enigma of time, Greene establishes that nothing in the laws of physics insists that it run in any particular direction and that “time’s arrow” is a relic of the universe’s condition at the moment of the big bang. And in explaining the big bang itself, Greene shows how recent cutting-edge developments in superstring and M-theory may reconcile the behavior of everything from the smallest particle to the largest black hole.

Shop: Half Price Books

1999: The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

 

Brian Greene peels away layers of mystery to reveal a universe that consists of eleven dimensions, where the fabric of space tears and repairs itself, and all matter―from the smallest quarks to the most gargantuan supernovas―is generated by the vibrations of microscopically tiny loops of energy. The Elegant Universe makes some of the most sophisticated concepts ever contemplated accessible and thoroughly entertaining, bringing us closer than ever to understanding how the universe works.

Shop: Half Price Books