(Print: February 18, 2020; 9781524731670; Knopf; 448 pages) Audio: 2/18/2020; 9781524734305; Penguin Random House Audio; duration 14:41:43; 15 parts. (Film: No.)

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
I was REALLY enjoying this, as Mr. Greene explained in layman’s terms/analogies about entropy, quantum physics, evolution, the possibility that particles have consciousness, and other interesting concepts, but my sense of inspiration and elation took a sharp nose-dive at chapter 7 when he expounds on mankind’s predisposition to believe, however false the beliefs may be. To his way of thinking there is no God, no psychic connections, no master plan. I feel like he spent 7 chapters explaining what he knows –he is very well read—an accomplished scholar, seemingly, in every subject—in order to offer this knowledge as evidence that his philosophy of an absence of any natural order, code of morals, afterlife or eternity is fact.
I disagree. Perhaps I missed something, I confess physics can seem over my head, but if I understood correctly, and I really think I did as far as his philosophy goes, religion cannot be dismissed as simply bogus.
I am always disappointed when intelligent people can admit to wonder, shock, and awe at the grandeur of the universe and everything in it, but cannot entertain the idea that it might mean that God is simply so much more expansive and grander than anything they’ve heard, and may not be entirely knowable. Perhaps they can describe in detail the beauty and magic—but where their knowledge drops off, they assign that to meaning everything is random, rather than the possibility that it may all simply appear random to we wee mortals. Knowing names for physical properties and behaviors does not equate to knowing everything. And just because it is beyond their complete comprehension does not necessarily mean that there is no more to be comprehended and no higher power. I’d think it would be evidence that there is.
Mr. Greene, actually, believes that the Big Bang Theory is a fact. Perhaps it is. I’m sure most, if not all scientists, believe it is. I wasn’t there—not that I recall I mean, so I’m open to both the possibility it is a fact and the possibility it is not. It seems to have little baring on my life, so I don’t give it much thought. Mr. Greene, likewise, believes a theory for how the cosmos will meet its end, all be it, billions of years hence, but non-the-less, with finality. I think this contributes to his anti-religion assertions—No absolute eternity=No God.
He does make a distinction between Spirituality and Religion, but says little about the former (so I’m not sure if its an approved thing or not) and too much about the later (to where I’m certain of the disapproval). I do agree that many have been brutally tortured and slaughtered in the name of religion (and would even add that way too much of what goes wrong with humanity can be associated to [a malpractice of] religion), but I don’t agree that it means religion has no core of truth or is bad, or is a complete fiction we depend on only because we need to believe in something that suggests individual eternity to offset the knowledge of our mortality. I think this is tossing the baby out with the bathwater….not seeing the forest for the trees…etc.
So, do I recommend the book? Well, gosh. On the one hand, this philosophy of the absence of a God is nothing new among scientists. And while, over the years, I’ve grown less attached to the religion of my childhood—less trusting of its literal accuracy, but I’m thinking if this denial of all things religious tarnished the book for me, anyone who has strong religious convictions would be more disappointed than I, but for those who are happy to think that science cannot live beside or within religion, but rather must substitute it, and would enjoy confirmation, they would love the entire book.

AUTHOR:
Brian Greene (2/9/1963), according to Wikipedia, “is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist. Greene was a physics professor at Cornell University from 1990-1995, and has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it in 2008. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.”

NARRATOR:
Brian Greene (2/9/1963). Perhaps it’s the public speaking and University teaching that has contributed to his polished delivery, for Brian is one of the few authors who can narrate his own works so perfectly that it’s impossible to imagine an actor could do it any better.

GENRE:
Non-fiction, Physics, Philosophy

SUBJECTS:
Physics, Evolution, Quantum physics, Philosophy, Religion

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From the Forward:
"Across cultures and through the ages, we have placed significant value on permanence. The ways we have done so are abundant: some seek absolute truth, others strive for enduring legacies, some build formidable monuments, others pursue immutable laws, and others still turn with fervor toward one or another version of the everlasting. Eternity, as these preoccupations demonstrate, has a powerful pull on the mind aware that its material duration is limited.
In our era, scientists equipped with the tools of experiment, observation, and mathematical analysis have blazed a new trail toward the future, one that for the first time has revealed prominent features of the eventual if still far-off landscape-to-be. Although obscured by mist here and fog there, the panorama is becoming sufficiently clear that we cogitating creatures can glean more fully than ever before how we fit into the grand expanse of time.
It is in this spirit, in the pages that follow, that we will walk the timeline of the universe, exploring the physical principles that yield orderly structures from stars and galaxies to life and consciousness, within a universe destined for decay. We will consider arguments establishing that much as human beings have limited life spans, so too do the very phenomena of life and mind in the universe. Indeed, at some point it is likely that organized matter of any kind will not be possible. We will examine how self-reflective beings contend with the tension entailed in these realizations. We emerge from laws that, as far as we can tell, are timeless, and yet we exist for the briefest moment of time. We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws that seem not to require an underlying rationale, and yet we persistently seek meaning and purpose."

RATING:
3 stars. The science was interesting, but the philosophy delivered as fact overshadowed it for me. ( )

Anybody who has driven down the Richmond Street ramp diving into Downtown Toronto from the Don Valley Parkway will remember this: a huge sign on top of an evangelical church proclaiming: “The End is Coming. Call Jim” with a telephone number following.

“Until the End of Time” by Brian Greene fleshes out what Jim might have told me if I had taken the time to call the phone number.

I went into reading this book with a firm idea of what I was looking for: is there an answer to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy or are we doomed to a collapsing Universe?

Dr. Greene was pretty firm in his answer: Doomed. With a capital ‘D’.

The obvious successes of evolution and the proliferation of information in the universe notwithstanding, eventually, in a billion billion billion years our Universe will go quiet with the disappearance of the final pockets of low entropy space.

And if there was any doubt about this turn of events, the confirmation of the Higgs Field not long ago showed us that all protons in the Universe will decay and take the physical world as we know it along with them.

The math confirms it.

The news was not enough to discourage Greene. He feels there is so much more to learn about us and our world, so much to appreciate about the accident we call life, that we should awaken each day to celebrate what’s here and what’s all around us.

Because I am reading this in the fall I kinda know what he’s talking about. The giant red maples on my street are so beautiful this time of the year I hardly know where to look first.

“Until the End of Time” is a nausea-inducing read not because of the message, and certainly not because of the quality of the writing because the writing is for the most part excellent.

Greene loses me a little in the discussion of religion and human kind’s frailties.

He moves beautifully from the tiniest particles in matter to the giant spaces between solar systems, and even galaxies; from today to the distant future. It’s the going back and forth that made me a little nauseous and actually happy to finally put the book down.

I think it didn’t help that he used the metaphor of the Empire State Building in New York to demonstrate how little we have gone on the eventual voyage of the universe from the Big Bang to the Big End.

Constantly looking up at the heights above and then looking down from the top — the end of the story — made this a vertigo-inducing affair.

I knew about the eventual demise of our solar system. I did not know what physicists believe to be the end game. How unlikely they believe Mind will survive even in a disembodied form.

When you meet Greene in person he is a very amiable scientist. We were lucky to have heard him interviewed at a theatre in Toronto just days before the city was locked down to reduce the spread of COVID-19 among the population.

And wasn’t there a touch of irony? ( )

Not my favorite by him. DNF ( )

Enjoyed learning about physics, atomic particles, cosmology, etc. I’ve always had a hard time grasping entropy, this helped a bit. Didn’t like the last two or three chapters as much as the earlier ones. ( )

Covers a lot, from sub-atomic particles, to biology, to evolution, to the origin of language, to the death of the universe, to Boltzmann brains. The presentation was entirely understandable by a layman such as myself. The limits to stellar fusion limits, why stars generally only create elements up to iron, and the special bipolar H2O geometry were explained especially well. ( )