String Theorist Brian Greene Wants to Help You Understand the Cold, Cruel Universeby Jeffrey Kluger
March 2, 2020
TIME"...Without gravity, everything just spreads out, diffuses, and that’s all there would be. But gravity has this wonderful capacity as a universally inward-pulling force which can undertake the following magic trick: it can pull things together, making it more orderly here, at the expense of releasing heat that makes it more disorderly out there. I call it 'the entropic two-step.'"
There’s a lot of satisfaction in such neat solutions to head-cracking problems. But there is an equivalent neatness to the ostensibly dispiriting conclusions Greene reaches in his books and in his research: that unhappy business of a cold universe, an insentient universe, of the individual as just a quantum contraption, behaving as a product not of choice but of probabilities and randomness. It’s where the free-will thing comes in: the universe is guided by quantum probabilities, and your "choices" are simply a part of that, the way a local breeze is part of the global weather system.
"My feeling is that the reductionist, materialist, physicalist approach to the world is the right one," Greene says. “There isn't anything else; these grand mysteries will evaporate over time." But despite such empirical bravado, Greene says more too–and whether he likes it or not, it's not reductionist, and if it's written in a book like
Until the End of Time, it could be written in the Vedas as well.
"Rather than feeling, 'Damn, there's no universal morality,' 'Damn, there's no universal consciousness,'" he says, "how wondrous is it that I am able to have this conscious experience and it’s nothing more than stuff? That stuff can produce Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, that stuff can produce the
Mona Lisa, that stuff can produce
Romeo and Juliet? Holy smokes, that's wondrous." ...
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