Brian Greene: Quantum Gravity, The Big Bang, Aliens, Death, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #232

The following is a conversation with Brian Greene, theoretical physicist at Columbia and author of many amazing books on physics, including his latest, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search For Meaning In An Evolving Universe. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, here's my conversation with Brian Greene. In your most recent book, Until The End of Time, you quote Bertrand Russell from a debate he had about God in 1948. He says, quote, (laughs) "So far as scientific evidence goes, the universe has crawled by slow stages to a somewhat pitiful result on this Earth and is going to crawl by still more pitiful stages to a condition of universal death. If this is to be taken as evidence of purpose, I can only say that the purpose is one that does not appeal to me. I see no reason, therefore, to believe in any sort of God." That's quite, uh, a depressing statement. As you say, this is a bleak outlook on our universe and the emergence of human consciousness. So, let me ask, what is a more hopeful perspective to take on this story?

Well, I think the more hopeful perspective is to more fully understand, um, what was driving Bertrand Russell to this perspective, and then to see it within a broader context, and really that's, in some sense, what- what my book Until the End of Time is all about. But, in brief, I would say that there's a lot of truth to what Bertrand Russell was saying there. When you look at the second law of thermodynamics, which is the underlying scientific idea that's driving this notion that everything's gonna wither, decay, fall apart, yeah, that's true. Second law of thermodynamics establishes that disorder, entropy, in aggregate is always on the rise, and that is indeed interpretable as disintegration and destruction over sufficiently long time scales. But my view is, when you recognize how special that makes us, that we are these exquisitely ordered configurations of particles that only will last for a blink of an eye in cosmological time-like terms, the fact that we're here and we can do what we do, to me, that's just really something that inspires gratitude, and wonder, and- and a sense of- of deep purpose by virtue of being these unique collections of entities that happen to rise up, look around, and try to figure out where we are and what the heck we should do with our time. So, it's not that I would disagree with Bertrand Russell in terms of the basic physics and the basic unfolding, but I think it's really a matter of the slant that you take on what it means for us.

(sighs) So, maybe we'll skip around a bit, but let me ask the biggest possible question then. You said purpose. So, what's the meaning of it all then? Is, uh, is there a meaning to life that we can take from this, from this brief emergence of complexity that arises from simple things and then goes into a- a heat death that is, once again, returns to simple things as the march of the second law of ther- thermodynamics goes on?