Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter and Meaning

foreign [Music] [Applause] this is Brian Greene and this Faith Shaylee everyone thank you very much this is Brian Green's book um in large print because time has ravaged my eyesight um and I first interviewed you Brian a few months after this book came out in May of 2020 which everyone can imagine was a very specific time you were Upstate I think I was in an apartment on the upper west side it was on Zoom the notion of time during those early days when people said lockdown it was it was a very it was a very specific experience to talk about time then now to return to this it's the same book it was interesting to see what I dog-eared to see what what moved me in fact to tears again I took a whole bunch of new notes and I love that we're having this discussion at the New York Historical Society because I mean not only is this book about the entire history of the universe and about when his history will cease to exist but also because history is arguably both a science and an art and you you characteristically make room in this book especially for mathematics and music for Schrodinger and Shakespeare and I mean it's it's just a joy to turn to the index of this book because you'll find there's Higgs particle there's Mick Jagger there's there's big bang big bounce big crunch big rip um there's over the rainbow Poe Sylvia Plath and you spend a moment on cheesecake which I think which I think vegan vegan cheese vegan cheesecake and you make it germane so my goal is to get to The Cheesecake tonight um so history is about stories and in this book your story kind of begins with what you call the romance of mathematics what do you mean by that or what did you mean by that uh well it's interesting I grew up you know four blocks from here you know 81st Street and at an early age my dad who was a composer singer musician he didn't go to college he had what he called an spht Seward Park High School Dropout so good and uh and so but he he loved ideas and so he taught me the basics of arithmetic at a very young age and then it sent me these problems like multiply this 30 digit number by this 30 digit number and I would spend the weekends four blocks from here with large pieces of construction paper just multiplying these numbers out and it just felt to me so compelling to do something that nobody had done before now in those cases it's because it wasn't interesting yeah you weren't trying to just get your dad's approbation you loved it yeah totally no I just got pulled into this world of numbers and it was kind of a romance of this mathematical language which I feel strongly is one that we invent that we don't discover but this wondrous thing that we compose that allows us to go off into strange places of prime numbers and the Riemann zeta function we all make these ideas up but this world that we create is so rich and compelling raise your hand if you're waiting for him to say Riemann zeta function um but in the book you say that part of the romance and this is this is relevant to this notion of thinking about our time is and and how finite it is is that mathematics is a journey toward insights so fundamental they will never change mathematics is permanent the the truths are and to me that is a remarkable quality it was really first emphasized to me again when I was quite young I I you know I went to is44 which is like three blocks from here uh and I exhausted the math curriculum relatively quickly so one of the teachers there gave me a a letter I didn't know what it said at the time he said take this go up to Colombia and find somebody to teach you so so together with my my older sister I was like a little tiny you know just like this so we'd like walk and we started knocking on doors randomly handing this letter and most would read it and hand it back but in the math department knocked on one door and gave it to a fellow and he read and he said sure I'll teach you uh for free we didn't have any money or anything and and so uh I would go three times a week and he would take me on these mathematical Journeys and and he was the one who really when I started to get interested in physics and and I was asking him like why do you do math why is it your thing and he said I I I do math because once you prove a theorem it stands forever and it finally hit me everything else is impermanent but these deep truths that come from this language of mathematics they do stand beyond the test of time and so there is something deeply compelling to latch on to those qualities of the world that are immutable and Mathematics certainly are among those qualities and your grasp of mathematics and and your participation in the way mathematics has pushed our understanding has led people like you to understand that the math tells us the universe is going to end right yeah I mean it is interesting you develop a language initially to describe everyday objects and entities with Precision that's really where mathematics comes from but then you can follow the math to begin to talk about things that we can't directly see or observe or test and yet are relevant to our sense of who we are and how we fit into some Grand picture and certainly after Albert Einstein gave us the mathematics of the general theory of relativity which is our understanding of gravity that's most relevant for How the Universe evolves on the largest of scales when you follow that mathematics forward in time in essence allowing you to kind of turn a cosmic film toward the future the frames and that Cosmic film are not particularly happy if you go sufficiently far into the future that's a spoiler alert but you you don't pull punches you kind of tell us that right of way yeah right away and that's I kind of want to get the bad news part over with early in the evening um what I mean let's get to some numbers how how old is the Universe and how much time do we have left yeah my birthday's on Friday so I'm feeling urgency yeah so so at least on human scales it's a it's a relatively calming story so back to the Big Bangs about 13.8 billion years and you know that's an enormous time scale it's so large that it even that's hard to wrap your mind around what that really means but just to give a sense if you were to compress all of cosmic history from the beginning until today into a single calendar year as Carl Sagan told us to do decades ago then all of recorded history takes place in the last 10 seconds of that calendar year so December 31st at 11 59 and 50 seconds is when we start to begin to record things that are happening in the human landscape all the rest is the lead up to that particular moment so that's from the beginning until today which is enormous but then if you go from today into the future the time scales get even longer and I could take us through those real quickly if that would be a relevant thing to do but I don't want to step on your narrative whoever no no that's fine I'm I'm quite breathlessly concerned about when how long humans are going to last yeah well that is a much more difficult question to address it's obviously an important one to all of us but because humans are these complex combination of ingredients I believe we're still fully governed by laws of physics so we can pursue that further but to make predictions about human behavior is more challenging than describing the behavior of the cosmos as a whole right because this is a very self-centered human question right because we could kill ourselves off a planet anytime soon and the universe isn't going to Blink yeah and it likely will happen but uh but but but if you put that to the side the fact that we there's a significant chance that we will self-annihilate one way or another putting that to the side you can say how long will the earth be here at least in principle and so that's probably on the order of 5 billion or so more years because in about five billion years the Sun is going to swelt over 200 times its current size it will certainly engulf Mercury and Venus it may engulf the Earth if it doesn't will certainly Scorch Earth in a dramatic way if the Earth should happen to survive that then it will hang around for another 100 billion billion years when it will spiral in to the dead son math tells us all of this yeah that's the amazing thing and and systems like the Sun and the Earth although they seem complicated perhaps if you just sort of think about it casually they're actually relatively simple what is the sun it's a spherical ball of gas what is the Earth it's a spherical ball of rock we have these complex shapes with all these inner processes that Define what it means to be human but inside the Sun there's not all that much going on inside the earth not all that much going on from the standpoint of physics that allows us to calculate the behavior of these macroscopic objects with significant confidence is is is there a thing that is time if there is no consciousness to Clock IT pun intended yeah I don't know uh could time itself simply be a product of human Ingenuity allowing us to organize bless you organize our perceptions of the world around us it could be that that's what time is but if you think somewhat more fundamentally of time as the language that allows us to discuss change right that's what time really is it allows us to say things were like this then and they're like this now and so there was a development and time is the dimension along which that development can take place now certainly change happened before human beings who are here right I mean we have great confidence again you know the Big Bang yields ultimately galaxies and stars and planets we understand and rough outline those processes things really did happen and so it's suggest strongly that there was a conception of time before we humans were here to recognize it and presumably there will be a conception of time after we are gone because things will unfold and we we call that entropy and we will we will get to that in a moment I just um I love all the the little nuggets that one picks up reading this I mean it's hard to have a a dinner party discussion of entropy to the extent you can but I do love learning that the the Big Bang the idea of the Big Bang wasn't it articulated by a Jesuit priest yeah it's true I don't know how many people are familiar with the name George lemaitre I mean just a clap if do you know that name pretty tepid uh everybody they might be friends a sense yeah yeah there we go thank you Father George yeah so so you know not not zero but you know it is a no name and he was an unusual character because not only did he have a PhD in physics from MIT from MIT but but if he was a Jesuit priest and he deeply wanted to understand the big questions and after Einstein wrote down the equations of the general theory of relativity lemaitre was the first to successfully apply them to the universe as a whole Einstein had done a version of this earlier on but the major is the one who really pushed this idea forward and he came to the conclusion that the Universe should be expanding and if it's expanding then if you sort of wind that film in Reverse everything gets smaller and smaller toward the path suggesting that everything was compressed together into what he called the Primeval Atom sort of an initial Atom from which everything emerged going forward in time that is not in the Old Testament well it depends how you interpret it yeah but it's so fascinating to me that it was it was a priest and we I'll let you have the glory will you will you tell everyone what Einstein said when he saw the Metro's calculations yeah so so lemaitre joins Einstein at the Solvay conference in Brussels in 1927 to to alert you know the Great Master regarding what he had found using the great Master's own equations and Einstein just turned to him and said your calculations are correct but your physics is abominable yeah Edward Einstein meant by that was you can't believe all mathematics is relevant to the world you have to have a an intuition regarding which math really tells us things that we should take seriously about reality and which math might be good math calculations are correct but belongs in a mathematics textbook not as a guide to the way the universe actually works now the reason Einstein knew that the calculations were correct is he'd already seen them about five years earlier by a Russian physicist named Alexander Friedman who kind of did the same calculation and showed at times and at that point Einstein said your calculations are incorrect and he wrote a little criticism of the paper sent it to the journal but Friedman stayed on Einstein and and proved time synthetic calculations were correct so Einstein changes his criticism to say you know the calculations are fine I don't think it's relevant to the world but in the margin of the criticism you can literally see that Einstein is saying but this is irrelevant to anything that we would care and then he like nicely didn't include that in the criticism because a little bit you know he rose above you know it would sound like sour grapes at that point but he clearly did not think that the universe is expanding at what point did he see the light uh well he saw the light when we saw the light so Edwin Hubble using the powerful telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory saw the light from distant galaxies that he recognized by virtue of how the light was being stretched that the galaxies were all rushing away and as galaxies Rush away the light that they send toward us will get stretched outward redshifted is a language that we use and he found a pattern in the redshifts that the father of galaxy is the faster it was moving away which is exactly what you'd expect from a universe that's expanding and once that data was clear Einstein pretty much agreed but I have to give you a small footnote that we never say but since it's a friendly small group here it stays here you know the fact of the matter is although we tell that story it's only partly correct certainly the data helped Einstein get over this notion that the Universe was static Eternal unchanging which is his philosophical Prejudice but it was really Arthur Eddington another famous physicist from that age and not to go footnote on footnote but he's the guy who when a reporter said to him how does it feel to be one of three people who understands the general theory of relativity he thought pensively and said I'm trying to think with the third person but but but so so Eddington who clearly Einstein respected you know he understood the general theory of relativity well Sheldon said that Einstein's view that the Universe might be static and unchanging that the math showed that that solution to his equations was itself unstable if you breathe slightly in this universe if you flick it slightly it will either start expanding or Contracting and so once Einstein saw that the math was unstable he said aha this is not a viable way of envisioning the universe at least according to his own general theory of relativity bottom line though by 1931 Einstein is a convert he realizes that space is expanding and and while we're dealing with fun trivia you can share with Friends The Big Bang was coined almost just dismissively right in on the BBC yeah yeah absolutely um so there was an alternative theory that was being pursued it's called the steady state cosmology and one of the proponents of that theory was on BBC discussing it and sort of dismissively refers to this other idea of an expanding universe as it all begins in one big bang you know and people like oh big bang you know it'll make a great sitcom someday yeah um and that was in 1949. 48 yeah or 48 okay um all right so the the two processes that are running the show are entropy and evolution and of course one degrades and creates disorder and the other creates and builds and and you talk about how they must act as a pair you call it the entropic two-step yeah tell us about that yeah so so there really are these two dominant Trends you know if we try to understand the evolution of the Universe from The Big Bang until today and on to the Future you can get mired in details and for certain questions that's really important to do but if it can find overall patterns and tendencies it gives you a better understanding of what's going on at least from sort of a 30 000 foot level and the two dominant processes are number one the rise in entropy this is called the second law of Thermodynamics it was developed as far back as the 1800s it's something that we're all familiar with order tends to degrade into disorder we've been to my apartment there you go right so you leave in the morning and maybe it's all straightened up you come back at night how often is it right so so it's almost always the case that it goes from order to disorder and it makes sense because there are so many ways for things to be disordered the Legos could be here or there or their kitchen bathroom you know everywhere but the very few ways for it to be ordered so it's harder to be ordered than disordered and when we use the language of entropy entropy is a measure of how much disorder that's all that it is and the idea is that entropy tends to increase because it's easier for things to have higher entropy than lower entropy and as much as that's true at your at your house it's true in the cosmos so we believe the Big Bang was a highly ordered beginning still uncertain why that is who what or how made it ordered at the very beginning we don't know the answer to that but it began in that highly ordered State and has been going toward ever greater disorder but then you can ask yourself well if it's going toward ever greater disorder what about us right these objects we're so amazing ordered right and and that's where this other process of evolution comes into the story which has an interplay with this Evolution has this wonderful capacity to build structures that are ever better adapted to their environment now normally we talk about that when you learn in high school at the level of living systems right that's after all how Darwin wrote it down living systems have progeny progeny generally can differ from their parents those distinct characteristics that make the child the progeny better able to survive are likely to persist because they will cause the being to survive and reproduce and thereby spread to Future Generations good but there's a version of evolution by natural selection it's much more General than the way Darwin initially framed it molecules themselves can engage in a version of evolution by natural selection you call that chemical combat it's a kind of chemical combat exactly because if you have molecules in some sense battling against other molecules to gain raw materials because once a molecule learns how to make a copy of itself and this is something that molecules can do like we know how DNA does it's a molecule that makes a copy of itself a molecule if it can pull in raw materials and use its own structure as a template for making copies of itself those molecules that can make more copies faster with greater economy and stability those molecules are going to win in the sense that they're going to dominate the molecular demographics and if that molecule makes a copy that's not precisely the same a mutation progeny that differs from the parent if the progeny is even better at making copies then it will come to dominate the environment so over a long period of time you go from molecule to molecule to molecule becoming ever better adapted to the environment until you get complex collections of molecules like us that are pretty good at being adapted to their surroundings and so you've got on the one hand entropy driving us toward ever greater disorder you've got evolution by natural selection allowing complex structures organized to exist and so these two forces play off of each other as the universe unfolds and yes even with the SE I don't know if the word is anomalous organized structures that Evolution creates entropy still increases that's right so you might say does evolution violate right the second law of Thermodynamics does the formation of an orderly structure like a human being or to be simpler a star or a planet does that somehow violate the drive toward ever greater disorder and the answer is actually no and it's a beautiful fact because take a star really good example a star formed from a lot of gas that falls in on itself because of the gravitational pull of each molecule of gas on every other now as the star is forming it gives off a great amount of heat and light in the process that heat and light streams outward carrying away a whole lot of disorder a whole lot of entropy so even though the star is a is a pocket of order if you take into account the entirety of the environment that the Stars formation influences there's more disorder ejected to The Wider world than there is order that's formed so overall entropy goes up even though you're left with a beautiful ordered star again with the Lego my kids can make a Lego castle but there are pieces all over the carpet because they had to root through everything to make something with even go a little bit further so let's say they were to use up all those pieces on the carpet okay where then would you get the extra entropy thumb as it would be from when I step on them and scream in pain sorry go ahead that's certainly part of it you have to take that contribution too but as your kids are putting the Lego pieces in they're burning up energy they are giving off sweat and and disturbing the molecular environment around them and if you take into account all of that there's more this or order being generated than order formed you you know the inking you yes that I mean sometimes we meet people we're like I get it that's the way that person is thinking feels like environmental waste let's compost but um but Consciousness you say that at some point our capacity for Thought will be part of what burns ourselves out yeah yeah because if you go back just for really smart people like you well you know you asked a question earlier in terms of how long could we last yeah and as I said it's a little hard to give a precise number because of human behavior but you might ask a related question which is in the best of all worlds if we are maximally smart at not annihilating ourselves and maximally clever about maybe uploading our Consciousness into more durable structures how long could we last if we're able to do all of that and that's a question that we can address because if you take into account that the act of thinking is itself a physical process I mean you can question that but I'm pretty confident that that's the case that the act of thinking is just a physical process taking place inside of our heads it too is subject to the second law of Thermodynamics which means every time you have a thought you are emitting waste to the environment now here's the what's the waste made of the waste is heat that's the most basic form of entropy the random motion of particles created because you've heated up the system and if you take into account that in roughly 10 to the 50 years from now it's a long time right we're 10 to the 10 years from The Big Bang but stay with me if you go 10 to the 50 years into the future you can calculate what the environment will be like and you can show that the environment will not be able to absorb any more waste Heat at that point like not one bit that's right one thought could break the camel so one more thought and the heat will not be able to disperse outward and so you will burn up you will fry in the process of trying to think oh my point when even thought itself will draw to an end so you already you already mentioned um there are I feel like in in this book you've kind of explicate just about everything I mean Big Bang he talks about Mick Jagger as as legendary if he's considered through the lens of sexual selection right he's part of our Evolution um but you are Swift and Unapologetic to name at least two great Mysteries that scientists like you have not solved one you mentioned we we know what what the materials of the Big Bang were we and when I say we I mean you know when the Big Bang happened nobody knows how the materials got there yeah how something was out of nothing right right yeah and it's a who what where where they come from yeah no it's uh all of those are good deep questions and I wish I had something insightful to say about it the best that we can really do at the moment is to know possibilities so one possibility might be that the Big Bang was the beginning of our realm of reality but that it wasn't the beginning of everything so and since the question of where did it come from there may have been a whole pre-history to the Big Bang which may have involved other Big Bangs giving rise to other Realms but of course that just pushes the question a little bit further back I mean maybe far far back but it still asks us to give an explanation of how whatever preceded the Big Bang got started and and so we don't have an answer to that the other possibility is somewhat more conservative which is to imagine that there is no before the Big Bang the time itself starts with the big bang you know a good analogy is you know if you were to try to walk North on planet Earth and you pass by some and they you ask them which way is North they point you you keep on going you pass by somebody else they continue to point you but when you get to the North Pole and you say to somebody there how do I go further north in the North Pole they say we don't really know what that means North begins at the North Pole you can't go further north than the North that's a meaningless question it may be the same thing the time go back a hundred a thousand a billion years go right back to the big bang and the notion of going further back may be as meaningless as going further north than the North Pole so it could have all started then but still I have no insight into why there is something rather than nothing right that's the most basic fundamental question and by nothing I don't mean empty space I mean truly nothing no space no time no energy no Quantum Fields no nothing why is it not like that the other ques I mean I'm sure there are Mysteries that you articulate that I'm not remembering but the other big one is consciousness right so many of you know that Brian very famous famously said to Stephen Colbert that we are all bags of particles and that went really well um and um he said he said that's a great pickup line which I thought was um yeah and that it is a it is actually try it um I wish I was still dating uh uh but we don't know so these are particles right this is particles you and I are particles we're this we're all made up of the same stuff and you and I have Consciousness and this table doesn't and we don't know why right we don't know why um now there are some things that you can say about that question clearly there's a difference between you and the table there are many ways of framing the differences but for this question the most important one is you have a certain molecular organization that the table does not have and that allows you to respond to the environment in a wealth of ways that the table can't and among the things that you can do is you can take in sensory information from the external world and process it inside your head in a way that the table cannot now it may be that Consciousness is nothing but the flow of particles and the information that they carry within a sufficiently organized coherent complex structure in our particular case that's a 3.3 pound gray Gloppy corrugated crenellated object that sits in this bone cave perched on our shoulders right I mean so that that's that that is where it happens for us and it may be that Consciousness is simply the result of complex organization and this is a correct motion of particles so it may be that we just come to that conclusion now especially in a world where we're headed toward artificial versions of intelligence if we have sufficient evidence I would imagine one day talking to artificial systems that they too they report you know chat GPT 1000 says I really am depressed no I'm really you know Brian I'm really sad and I'm not you know I'm not just saying that I really am feeling it right now you know if if that really happens we may and we're convinced we may come to the conclusion that Consciousness just is the result an emergent property that comes from sufficiently complex calculations that may be the answer what you are 100 certain of is that that Consciousness does not provide free will right there is you say there is no free will yeah do all scientists say there's no free will no but they didn't have any choice in their in their answer but um uh you you could have predicted that yeah um but uh but yes I well I should qualify slightly um under the assumption which I'm confident of but nobody really knows from what we just said if Consciousness is nothing but the result of certain physical processes then I'm convinced that we don't have free will that free will is a misleading notion but if you're of the perspective that no no no no no you got the physical but Consciousness is something else you know it's out there some Consciousness field that's governed by completely different considerations which scientists did think right some people well what they did was and it's a really good reference they didn't think that about Consciousness per se they thought about life vitalism vitalism so the idea was you can have whatever organization of matter that you want but it will never be alive until you inject something else from the outside of Life Force you know vitalism is exactly the right way of talking about but nobody believes that at least almost nobody believes that any longer because as we have understood life at the molecular but the biomechanical and so forth as we've gone deeper and deeper the need for something beyond the physical has evaporated and so whereas life was so mysterious a hundred years ago that we envisioned you needed something else for things to become alive we no longer feel that way and I suspect Consciousness now feels so incredibly mysterious I mean where does this inner world inside of our heads come from why don't we just do what we're doing without an inner World taking place behind our eyeballs you can imagine that that could be the way that we are and yet we are not so it feels deeply mysterious but it may be that as we understand it better as with vitalism the idea of something from the outside will just go away that's my expectation you now we didn't talk about the Free Will part and I'm happy to uh go for it yeah you know so once you get there I I I have to confess I I I would never argue with you about anything and I wouldn't even argue with you about free will but there is a part of me I'll I'll listen and I'll be like well yeah that sounds right of course I'm sure that's all right I'm sure all that science is right and then I will walk out of here thinking I have free will and by the way I will too you will absolutely because you need to describe the world using many levels of analysis many kinds of stories right so write down at the particle level the electrons the quarks the neutrons and so forth they We Believe are fully governed by physical law and so if thought is nothing but the motion of particles like that inside of your head then all of your thought and all of your behavior right like right now I just seemingly feel felt like I made the choice to lift up the cup but what was it you didn't I didn't at a molecular level think look inside me as I do this really peer inside me right it's just the motion of particles in my head alerting particles in my arm to contract and move it's just the motion of particles if you didn't know that I was a living system you just say oh wow a lot of particles moving all governed by the laws of physics I mean think about my particles it's not like they move according to the laws of physics for a while and then they say hang on guys stop wait for Brian to make a decision okay he's made a decision keep going the laws are governing all of the time and so if the laws are governing all the time then they were governing the decision that I seemingly made so write down at the particular level it seems quite clear to me that the notion of our interceding in their motion is incoherent but go up to the human level right the chemical the biological the psychological the physical you come to the human level and like you I experience a world in which I seem to have free will what do I view that as I view that as it's useful probably from an evolutionary perspective for us to have the sensation of free will the sensation is real we all have it all the time I feel like I'm in a drive receipt right now I feel like I'm making the choices and decisions of my next word and action and so forth the sensations are real but the fundamental freedom of will to which that sensation seems to point that is illusory I it makes me think of kind of what you move into in the second half of the book about how crucial it is in in our in the unfolding of human existence to make up stories to make up narratives in a way the way you just described it is that if we are if none of us has free will to function as human beings then it is a fiction it is a story We Tell ourselves that we are in charge of our actions yeah right and and I want to I want to move into that part of the book um I I'm more on the art side and and it speaks to me right so I make I make meaning in my life by by I I actually survive in experience by trying to figure out what it means by turning it into a story that I can probably tell somebody else and you are a gifted writer and you help make meaning by recognizing patterns in the universe and the way you write them down is not only words but numbers right yeah when you will you talk about how language fits into not only our um the way we we Face our our very short time on this Earth as humans but in into evolution yeah I mean so you know as we have tried to survive a vital part of that Echoes exactly what you are describing we have a need to Anchor our experience through some kind of meaning presumably those of our ancestors who had that capacity to invest their experiences with more than just mere survival but survival for a reason were the ones that prevailed and they ceded to us this intrinsic urge to invest experience with meaning and so what do we do we make up I mean the universe has no meaning it's just collections of particles moving under the laws of physics that's all that there is you have this line where you say we want you we want to hug the universe and it's unrequited that's right we urge for the universe to give us something more than laws of physics and being collections of particles but the universe is unable to meet that need so what do we do we make up our own meaning and how do we make that up by telling a whole variety of stories some of them communicate information to our peers and to the Next Generation but some of it we tell in order to feel a greater connection a greater social connection to those around us a greater connection to the Universe At Large and those stories take a whole variety of forms and I do consider the laws of physics should be one very particular very precise story that shows how we are in a literal sense connected to the cosmos but as you go up into the Endeavors of human capacity to write novels and plays and and to create it evidences this urge for meaning and it shows how wonderfully capable we are of inventing tools and techniques for giving us a sense of Greater connection and you you quote proust and who said only through ART can we enter the secret Universe of another and I think that reflects also to the question that you're asking about language yeah yeah so language is only one way of telling stories it's a powerful way of telling stories because it allows for a certain precision and flexibility in the ideas that we want to communicate but I think we're all deeply aware that the ways of knowing the world that are Beyond language not everybody agrees with that right dickenstein would not have agreed with that right the limits of language are the limits of my world is the approach that he envisioned to be the case that it's all rooted in language but I think anyone who's had the experience which I don't want to get all lofty here but if you have that sort of transcendent moment which is not something you articulate in words and it's not an inner story that you're telling yourself in words you just experiencing this thing that's transporting you to someplace else it's a way of knowing the world that is beyond language and I believe that's what pruce was referring to yes it is it I am I am I have spent my life getting literal chills when I when I see a Broadway show right and I'm I'm never not grateful for it I'm like this is and I don't have to have words for it this this is what art does to me it may I don't know what gives you chills but well there are many examples and and to me it's not only that I don't have words yeah I'm thankful that I don't have words because I don't want it to be words when I try to put it into words I diminish it it's just the raw experience which itself is what matters Transcendence yes so this there's a question here and it leads into a story I want you to tell so so you've just expressed how um the Arts are a way we deal with The Human Condition and of course religion and spirituality and belief there's there's a chapter you have called brains and belief and and you write The evolutionary package deal the Victorious evolved brain has qualities that Embrace religion with open arms and someone here asks in your view how does spirituality fit into the Practical understanding we have of ourselves and our place in the universe would you please tell the story of um walking with your dad and your sister in the late 60s at the um what's it called The nomberg Band Shell that's just right on poet's walk in Central Park yeah so you you know this was the late 60s although my my brother corrects me it was probably 1970. uh so it'll be in the the next next Edition uh but um you know so uh my brother's 13 years older than I am and he left to be a Hare Krishna in in the 60s and I had not seen him in in quite some a long time and so my father took my sister and I to what was a Hare Krishna happening at the at the Bandshell there and uh I'm looking and I'm like oh my God is that my brother you know shaved head and playing and singing and it was quite a moment for me because I had no idea at that point that he had gone into this this particular face and so it was my father's way of I don't know gently taking us to this realization that his life had gone in a different direction than perhaps we had anticipated and you you write about how his his your brothers they search for stability you you have you have a healthy respect for religion in this book that that why people need it right or spirituality in your words and you write about your brothers his Vedic search for stability is akin to the lure you found studying fundamental physics yeah again um I I really do see spiritual and religious practice as one of the other stories that we tell and again that's in no way meant to diminish any of these particular undertakings and perspectives and beliefs but rather I do see as I said physics is a story science is a story and so as we human beings search for meaning and purpose there are many ways that we do that and for some imagining that there is something beyond the physical is the way that they're able to get to a place of comfort and my view is look we are these little creatures crawling around this non-descript planet that's orbiting this completely ordinary star in the suburbs of a completely ordinary Galaxy which is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies Each of which has hundreds of billions of stars and now with the James Webb Space Telescope we're learning that basically all of those stars have planets so we're talking about hundreds of billions of hundreds of billions of planets out there right and in this immensity of space who wouldn't be anxious right who who wouldn't have some need for something beyond the everyday to try to give us a sense of stability and connection yeah I in my life have done that through through physics and through trying to understand the Deep physical structure of things and connecting it to things of the everyday but many others Go in different directions and I respect anything that gives someone that Comfort again look religion has been used in many ways not all good by any means we can go down down the trajectory but everybody knows what I'm referring to so if your belief system gives you comfort and allows you to live in this utterly absurd reality that we're thrust into that's a fantastic thing and should be respected there's no way to absorb this book without constantly referring to one's own entropic existence right the the macro can always be boiled down to the micro as as we read this and my experience now having read this twice is that this book rips with poignancy this is a this is so this book is so poignant to me and I wonder of all your books was this the most emotional because you share very very beautiful personal stories yeah no no absolutely I mean um I mean string theory is emotional so I uh you know elegant no but uh but you're ABS absolutely there's no comparison I mean every other book that I wrote was ultimately about trying to explain some deep part of science right that's really what it was all about thank you and this book was not so much about explaining the science as to explaining how it is that we human beings how do we fit into this Grand cosmological Story and and how do we make sense of it and how do we cope with it and and what will be in the far future and yes there was certainly for me dark moments when I was writing this book as I came to terms with things that I've been thinking about for decades ultimately I came out of the experience with a very positive perspective I didn't you know look there's a when we talk about the far future and and we learn that stars disintegrate and plan is disintegrating galaxies that should integrate and black holes disintegrate into a spray of particles that will walk through the darkness that far future can feel Bleak right and and and it's so Bleak and you can imagine that you know on your darkest day however Bleak and insignificant you might feel thinking about this kind of far future you know makes it even more Bleak and insignificant right I mean that's certainly one way that you can come out of this but my view is quite the reverse my view is you know I mean Nabokov said that we humans are a brief crack of Light Between Two eternities Of Darkness now he was really talking about the individual there's a period before you're born a period after you die and as you live that's that brief crack of light right but it's true of the cosmos more generally right humanity and life and Consciousness is a brief crack of light we're like a sliver between two eternities of Darkness and so you know my view is that's true but how fortunate and spectacular it is that we get to participate in that how unlikely is it that particles happen to coalesce into a structure called faith and a structure called Brian the odds against it are immense and yet we are here and so the view is if you recognize how improbable it is that we are here and on top of that you recognize how amazing is it that a collection of particles can think and feel and love and hate and imagine and create and you know build the pyramids and construct the Great Wall approve the Pythagorean theorem build rocket ships go to the Moon look back to a fraction of a second after the beginning wow right that we can do that yeah and so when you focus on that brief crack of light as the place where you invest meaning you can come out I think in a very positive outlook it I have I have to share my own um recent um it's called nomberg Bandshell right yeah you all know where it is right right the poet's walk and it it makes me think of someone fully celebrating his Humanity just a couple days ago I was walking by after dropping my daughter off at school I walked through Central Park it's seven it's like 8 15 in the morning some dude is in the Bandshell all by himself singing The Impossible Dream at the top of his lungs and he started like 52 Keys too high so so and it's New York so everybody's just walking by except and then there are people doing Tai Chi over there but I stop and I film it and when he gets to this note that he cannot reach it's that line um to reach the impo The Impossible star and he stops and he goes yeah yeah I was like that's New York and and that is a man who was he was looking at his finite existence in the face and he's like I'm gonna reach that unreachable star um God You Gotta Love New York um this is this is I mean this is part of this tags on to your to you to what you just said someone wants to know how do you deal with your imper impermanence and and that leads to another question I wanted to ask you which is what do you want your legacy to be well I I I don't think it's about Legacy I think there was a time I think when I bought in to that cultural perspective that it's all about leaving something a trace for the future but when you realize that cosmologically speaking it every Trace evaporates is that really what we should focus upon and and so again it's it's really a focus more on on the everyday look this is not a new idea that we should focus on the here and the now but for me getting to it through this cosmological journey emphasizes it in a way that previously never had a pull on me the way that it does in this setup so it really is not about trying to leave a legacy it's about trying to live fully to trying to actualize and and and and and and family and relationship in the Here and Now is where the footprint is before um before we close I wanted to share something which is that as I said I read this book first three years ago and then when I knew I was going to talk to you again I picked it up and and I'm I'm flipping through and I found on on page 163 I had apparently three years ago just stuck in this Post-it that my daughter who was then five and is now about to be nine wrote and it just says thank you I love you so much and just seeing how her handwriting has changed like now this is you know she scrawled this out and she got it right now she does cursive and she writes Mandarin characters and but she still says that to me and and you look the same as you did three years ago obviously I look the same as I did three years ago but but our kids right our our kids are the ones that grow so fast that remind us how time has changed and if and if there's anything that can stop time even for a nanosecond it's what you said it's it's this it's this memory of how precious our lives are and how miraculous it is that we're here yeah without a doubt you you write I just want to close with your own words um you write uh is in the last chapter we are ephemeral we are evanescent yet Our Moment is rare and extraordinary a recognition that allows us to make life's impermanence and the scarcity of self-reflective awareness the basis for value and a foundation of gratitude and this moment is rare and you are extraordinary and I'm we are also grateful for your work and your generosity of spirit thank you thank you foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you

Channel: World Science Festival

Views: 161,098

Keywords: What is Time?, Does time exist?, Brian Greene, string theory explained, Best explanation of time, Until the End of Time, why is string theory right?, Brian Greene book, quantum gravity, Einstein, extra dimensions of space, holographic worlds, supersymmetric quantum field theories, mathematical physics, best science talks, New York City, World, Science, Festival, 2023, What is time? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sean Carroll, What Actually Are Space And Time?, Julian Barbour

Id: xlyYipjw560

Length: 56min 14sec (3374 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023