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

And I was telling you, I just started your new book.

And tell people your book, One More Times the title. Until the end of time. It's out today.

And the one I think most people know if they know you at all, the elegant universe.

Until the end of time was that your more recent memorization and that came out how long ago? 2020 right at the pandemic.

and your books are still out there uh elegant universe uh uh give me the other two fabric of the cosmos hidden reality but the most recent is until the end of time and my most favorite so and is that out yet till the end of time

yeah that's out yeah oh cool and who published that that was khanoff khanoff very nice until the end of time we'll look for them all right dude thanks chuck always good to have you man always a pleasure all right this has been cosmic queries with the one the only inimitable brian green friend and colleague professor of physics and math right up the street here in new york city at columbia this is neil degrasse tyson as always bidding you to keep looking up

That's the title. That's the title. That's the title. No, the subtitle. What's the subtitle? Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe.

Your book, Until the End of Time, brings me to the conclusion.

It's conceivable. I'm looking at the questions. He's got a fan base out there. He does.

This is his fourth book.

And his first book that anyone knows about was a mega bestseller, which was? The Elegant Universe.

And let me get the title correct of his latest book, because this title leaves nothing out. Here it is, Until the End of Time, Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, came out last year.

Brian Green whose most recent book is, I gotta like read this title because it's so inclusive. Until the end of time, mind matter and our search for meaning in an evolving universe.

His most recent book, published in 2020, is Until the End of Time, Mind, Matter and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe.

But when you look at the science more closely, you realize that that summary is a little quick. Because the science itself makes clear that there can be these intermediate windows of time. In fact, we're living in that window right now, when the universe can enjoy order, it can enjoy structure, it can be the home of beauty.

So I keep thinking of, you know, Augustine or Reinhold Niebuhr, basically this analysis, this sophisticated analysis of the human condition that you know, that we are torn between the fact of our finitude and mortality, and these intimations we have almost at a physical level, right in our bones and our bodies of eternity, or infinity.

And Ernest Becker is for me, one of the great influences in my way of thinking about the world. He wrote a book that isn't well known anymore. It won the Pulitzer Prize back in the 70s, but I don't really hear many people speak about it any longer called The Denial of Death.

And then this book that you published Until the End of Time also kind of moves beyond that into a different territory. But you begin with some organizing principles from physics, from science.

My view from the perspective of what we are as physical beings is we are nothing but collections of particles that are fully governed by the laws of physics, you know, colloquially where we are bags of particles that have a particular organization that allows for certain biological functions to take place. And that's all that we are.

The fact that we can do that and the fact that we're willing to do that in the face of our realizations about reality, to me, that's deeply noble. That's the nobility.

Science is a powerful, exquisite tool for grasping an eternal reality. But within that rubric, within that understanding, everything else is the human species contemplating itself, grasping what it needs to carry on and telling a story that reverberates into the darkness, a story carved of sound and etched into silence, a story that at its best stirs the soul.