Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“I Think That I Think, Therefore I Think That I Am”
- Ambrose Bierce

I am reminded not only of Ambrose Bierce’s aphorism above (which is mentioned by Greene) but also of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s comment upon visiting a bridge under construction in the North of England. Hearing the almost incomprehensible Scots and Geordie banter among the workers, he remarked ‘Isn’t it amazing what people who talk like that can do?’

It is indeed almost miraculous what human beings can do with language. But many believe they can use language not just to build bridges but to tell the rest of us about ultimate reality. Descartes used language to prove the reality of his own existence in his famous Cogito Ergo Sum. Before him, Anselm of Canterbury used language to demonstrate what he thought was the reality of the divine by simply defining God as ‘that of which nothing greater can be thought’. Brian Green thinks we’ll eventually be able to explain everything about reality - ourselves and God included - if we just tell enough stories about it.

Greene considers himself a reformed reductionist - that is, someone who used to believe in one fundamental story about reality. He now believes that the scientific stories by chemists, physicists, and biologists are not the only stories that are meaningful. “There are many ways of understanding the world,” he says. A non-scientist who reads novels, biographies, and poetry can only agree. What matters for him is that the stories that are told are increasingly consistent and coherent with each other. It is unclear how he proposes to compare, say, Finnegans Wake and the second law of Thermodynamics for consistency and coherence. Nevertheless, this is his measure not just of scientific progress but also of human cultural development.

The story he likes best because of its inclusiveness is that of gravity and entropy. The way he tells it, gravity is the force which sparked the entire cosmos in the Big Bang. A small and statistically unlikely perturbation in the microscopic ball of proto-energy caused that extremely low entropy ball to expand in a billionth of a second to a universe billions of light years in size. The photons and other nuclear material contained in the original singularity are spread through newly existing high-entropy space virtually instantaneously. Ever since, gravity and entropy have been in a continuous battle, driving not just the creation and destruction of galaxies, stars and planets, but also the life that has emerged on the latter, including us. We are little islands of relatively low entropy, contributing the best we can to the eventual heat-death of the universe. Even without our industrial level carbon footprints, we can’t help but turn high quality energy into useless background radiation.

Great story. But here’s a layman’s problem: Gravity hasn’t been considered a force, much less the originary creative force, since Einstein formulated his theory of relativity. Gravity, as I understand it, is a perturbation of space-time. So when Greene states “According to the general theory of relativity, the gravitational force can be repulsive,” I start to get seriously confused. Did space-time exist before the Big Bang? If not, how can gravity be its motivating factor?

And Greene goes on to explain that critical moment of orgasmic cosmic release, “When a tiny speck of space finally makes the statistically unlikely leap to low entropy, repulsive gravity jumps into action and propels it into a rapidly expanding universe—the Big Bang,” I am left speechless as he treats this non-thing of entropy as a substance that colonises the newly formed world. Entropy is not a force or a substance but a descriptive condition. Having it do cosmic battle with another non-force/non-substance like gravity seems to me to be pushing a metaphor beyond its design tolerances.

Is he condescending to popular usage or just being sloppy? In any case, I’d really like to understand how a tiny nick in the constitution of the speck of initial energy could cause an apparent violation of quantum laws of movement wherein light and atomic particles can move millions of time faster than photons (not to mention matter) can travel. His cavalier treatment of time and alternative entropic ‘trials’ before the Big Bang seem to me just hand-waving. I felt like an eager adolescent searching for the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But just when things start to get really hot, Greene changes the subject.

According to this story, if the universe is expanding forever, entropy is the winner of the cosmic game and the universe is effectively eternal. On the other hand, if there is an ultimate cosmic collapse, gravity triumphs. But in the latter case, there would be a limit to gravity’s reign, just as there is in the formation of stars. When densities increase sufficiently, nuclear fusion kicks in, and gravity gets checked and the gravity/entropy “two-step” is ignited anew. So the whole process would start again - and crucially not from the same place as the Big Bang. But this too implies eternity.

Eternity bothers me because it points to something beyond language. It’s an indication, like the word ‘God’, of the ultimate inadequacy of language to describe reality (‘reality’ is also one of those words). I am encouraged that Greene doesn’t think that a single scientific or mathematical story is sufficient and that we must ‘sweep in’ as many accounts of existence as we can, including non-scientific ones. But I despair when someone like Greene thinks that this will improve our understanding of reality. It may help us to stop persecuting each other; it will certainly result in faster, more powerful, and more varied machines and products of all sorts. But it will get us no closer to reality, to that which is permanently beyond language.

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