Until the End of Time

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The Lure of Eternity

Beginnings, Endings, and Beyond

In the fullness of time all that lives will die. For more than three billion years, as species simple and complex found their place in earth s hierarchy, the scythe of death has cast a persistent shadow over the flowering of life. Diversity spread as life crawled from the oceans, strode on land, and took flight in the skies. But wait long enough and the ledger of birth and death, with entries more numerous than stars in the galaxy, will balance with dispassionate precision. The unfolding of any given life is beyond prediction. The final fate of any given life is a foregone conclusion.

And yet this looming end, as inevitable as the setting sun, is something only we humans seem to notice. Long before our arrival, the thunderous clap of storm clouds, the raging might of volcanoes, the tremulous shudders of a quaking earth surely sent scurrying everything with the power to scurry. But such flights are an instinctual reaction to a present danger. Most life lives in the moment, with fear born of immediate perception. It is only you and I and the rest of our lot that can reflect on the distant past, imagine the future, and grasp the darkness that awaits.

It s terrifying. Not the kind of terror that makes us flinch or run for cover. Rather, it s a foreboding that quietly lives within us, one we learn to tamp down, to accept, to make light of. But underneath the obscuring layers is the ever-­present, unsettling fact of what lies in store, knowledge that William James described as the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight. 1 To work and play, to yearn and strive, to long and love, all of it stitching us ever more tightly into the tapestry of the lives we share, and for it all then to be gone ­well, to paraphrase Steven Wright, it s enough to scare you half to death. Twice.

Of course, most of us, in the service of sanity, don t fixate on the end. We go about the world focused on worldly

Brian Greene

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

A splendid and invigorating read . . . [Greene] fans out the fabric of our present understanding, deftly untangling then interweaving the science of everything from black holes to quanta to DNA, tracing how matter made mind made imagination, probing the pull of eternity and storytelling and the sublime.
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Until the End of Time is encyclopedic in its ambition and its erudition, often heartbreaking . . . A love letter to the ephemeral cosmic moment when everything is possible.
Dennis Overbye, The New York Times Book Review
 
Ambitious and utterly readable . . . [Greene] weaves personal stories, scientific ideas, concepts and facts into a delightful tapestry . . . What is remarkable about Mr. Greene s book is how he has delved into deep questions that not only have no simple answers but may never be settled at all.
Priyamvada Natarajan, The Wall Street Journal

"[Greene] says it all with such ebullience, such ingenuous enthusiasm, that if he told you the whole cold, amoral universe was ending tomorrow you'd roll with it the way he would as just one more dramatic chapter in an extraordinary tale in which we all have a precious if fleeting role." Time

"A cracking read. . . . The origins of matter, life and consciousness, and their grisly fate, are laid out here with elegant clarity. If you want to know how everything got here and where it's going, read this book." The Sunday Times (London)

"Marvelous. . . . [Greene's] prose style is one that any novelist would envy. . . . [He] traces a tremendous arc through pretty well everything: a thrilling venture, at once frightening and consolatory." The Irish Times

"Greene writes beautifully." The Courier-Mail (Brisbane)

There s tremendous joy in witnessing a brilliant and curious mind wrestle with such profound issues. [Greene] takes readers on a remarkable