Joe Rogan Experience #1428 - Brian Greene

Three, two, one. Brian Greene, ladies and gentlemen. How are you, sir?

Good, thank you. How are you?

Thanks for doing this, man.

Oh, it's my pleasure.

I've-- I've enjoyed your work for many, many, many years, so, uh, I really appreciate you coming in here and talking.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

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

And how's it going?

It's going well. It's, uh, hasn't confused the shit out of me yet, but I know it's coming. (laughs)

It will be coming, no doubt, no doubt.

With all your work. So the beginning of time, the beginning of the universe, to the end. That's essentially what you're summarizing.

Yeah, that's the, uh, that's the backdrop to the entire narrative of the book. I, I basically want the reader to get a feel for the whole thing, how it started, how things like you and me rise up, how consciousness emerges, issues of free will and whether we have it, and then on to the future, what's gonna happen to us and the world and the universe as time elapses to the far, far future.

It's, uh ... I'm, I'm just getting to the part where you're talking about how entropy and evolution sort of commingle to, to create life. And when you think of entropy, a lot of people think of something dissolving into chaos.

Yeah, exactly.

But that's the- not necessarily the case.

It's only part of the story. I mean, entropy kinda gets a bad rap, right?

Yeah.

It's the thing that you want to avoid, but somehow the laws of physics don't allow you to avoid it. It's this disintegration, it's this decay, it's this drive toward disorder, and that's kind of true. But the reality of the situation is more subtle, because overall, entropy needs to go up. But that doesn't mean there can't be little pockets of order that form along the way. And in fact, the universe is incredibly clever. Stars, the ubiquitous feature of the heavens, they are pockets of order that naturally form, but as they form, they increase the entropy in the surroundings. So the net entropy goes up even though this beautiful, orderly, bright object in the sky appears. And it's only because of the appearance of stars that the universe is an interesting place. Without stars, the particles of the universe would just disperse. The universe would get bigger and bigger, colder and colder, and that would be it. There wouldn't be any structure in the universe if it wasn't for the force of gravity.

Stars themselves, just the fact that they exist, is very strange, that you have this thing, uh, d- and ours is fairly small, right? It's a million times larger than Earth.

Yeah.

And it's gonna burn for billions of years, and it's just hovering there.