Why, the philosopher Leibniz asks, is there something rather than nothing? It is not a question easily answered, though philosophers and scientists never tire of trying, since not only is there something, that something includes, uniquely, us.
We take our species to be an inevitable consequence of the originary event that took place 13.8 billion years ago, because we are here and able to think and talk about it. But the fact of our existence, as Brian Greene observes, is astonishing. “Rerun the big bang but slightly shift this particle’s position or that field’s value, and for virtually any fiddling the new cosmic unfolding will not include you or me or the human species or planet earth or anything else we value deeply.”
In other words, we are a cosmological accident.
Prof Greene is nothing if not daring. The subtitle to his book, “Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe”, might lead one to expect a quasi-religious formulation of a Theory of Everything – the stubbed TOE that many a modern savant has suffered – but not a bit of it. On the contrary, “we must accept that there is no grand design . . . There is no final answer hovering in the depths of space awaiting discovery.” And a good thing, too.
The lack of an ultimate meaning does not make the universe negligible or our lives worthless. “Certain special collections of particles can think and feel and reflect, and within these subjective worlds they can create purpose.” Given the unlikeliness of our having come into being in the first place, we are the magnum miraculum, and Brian Greene is here to tell us why.
And to tell us many other things, along the way. His marvellous book begins with beginnings, traces a tremendous arc through pretty well everything, and closes with a meditation on the end of us and of all creation. To accompany him along that curve is a thrilling venture, at once frightening and consolatory.
Greene is a scientist – he is director of the Centre for Theoretical Physics at Columbia University, and one of the leading proponents of superstring theory, which seeks to account for the mind-boggling implications of quantum mechanics – but his prose style is one that any novelist might envy. Yet in his loftiest probings of the cosmos he is solidly down to earth – “Consider a banana” – and is as entertaining as he is informative. This is exemplary popular science – and there is not an equation in sight, except E=MC2, which we all think we understand.
‘Finite nature’
In his preface, Greene strikes a sombre note. Just as Freud pointed to the fact that everything that exists tends towards inexistence – ashes to ashes, dust to dust – so Greene reflects that all human endeavour is at an essential level a response to the consciousness of death. Thus, “much of human culture – from artistic exploration to scientific discovery – is driven by life reflecting on the finite nature of life”. It is a notion that Greene finds not depressing but positively bracing. He knows a thing or two about permanence – “The enchantment of a mathematical proof might be that it stands forever” – but also he knows that “forever” to be a relative term.
It would be wrong to imagine that this book is a doom-laden jeremiad, a painted billboard assuring us that the end is nigh. Yes, for the world there is darkness to come at the end, but for now, “by envisioning a future bereft of stars and planets and things that think, your regard for our era can appreciate toward reverence”.
Greene is much concerned with the scale of things, from the micro to the macro. It is well to keep in mind, then, that from the moment we learned to stand upright and start whacking things over the head, including each other, we have conceived of ourselves as the centre of the universe, the point of equilibrium between the small and the large, the measure against which all things are measured. This accounts for our wonderment at the tininess of atoms and the vastness of stars. Take away the human perspective, however, and much of the wonder dissipates. To a proton a proton is not small, to the sun the sun is not large. It behoves us to be humble, and know our place.
One of the driving forces of Greene’s book is the force that helped to form the universe, namely, entropy. Put very crudely, the second law of thermodynamics states that order will become disordered, inevitably. The fact that the process cannot be reversed – a shattered glass will not unshatter itself – accounts for the arrow of time that travels in only one direction. Or at least it does for us. At the atomic level, time is not time as we know it. And one of the great unanswered questions in science is, at what point does the quantum world give way to our world – where is the join?
Path to disorder
Entropy works in two ways, in what Greene calls the Entropic Two-Step, which “lies at the heart of how a universe heading toward ever-greater disorder can nevertheless yield and support ordered structures like stars, planets and people”. After the Big Bang, gravity and entropy worked together to form the universe as we – partially – know it. The process was one of give and take. Entropy sent particles outwards, cooling them, while gravity pulled other particles inwards, heating them. As heat at the core rose, nuclear fission joined in. And then, as Greene has it, “A star is born.”
One of the most fascinating sections of the book tackles the problem of consciousness. The question is simply put. Everything that exists is composed of physical particles, including us and our brains. But how can inert matter develop consciousness? Greene paraphrases the philosopher David Chalmers, who in 1964 formulated what he called the “hard problem”. “[Chalmers] argued that not only are we lacking a bridge from mindless particles to mindful experience, if we try to build one just using a reductionist blueprint – making use of the particles and laws that constitute the fundamental basis of science as we know it – we will fail.”
Chalmers’s hypothesis has met with many challenges – though presumably anyone with a firm belief in a personal God would not even bother arguing the point – yet none is wholly convincing. One counter proposal is that “the particles themselves are endowed with an innate attribute of consciousness . . . that cannot be described in terms of anything more fundamental”. But surely the obvious objection here is that the problem is simply shifted down to the micro-level. Why is it less puzzling to think that particles should possess some form of proto-consciousness that feeds upwards to make us conscious?
‘Survival value’
A more elegant argument is put forward by the neuroscientist Michael Graziano. His thesis is based on the fact that as we move through our day, we encounter a bewildering quantity of fantastically detailed information which, in order to be in some way absorbed, must be schematically simplified. In the early days of evolution, “brains that may have become distracted by the billowing details of the physical world are brains that would have been swiftly eaten. Brains that survived are brains that avoided being consumed by details that lacked survival value.”
This process of schematic simplification also applies to the self – “You continuously create a schematic mental representation of your own state of mind.” As the existentialists used to say, to be conscious is to be conscious of being conscious. In Graziano’s view, by virtue of having to deal with the welter of things out there – one of which is the inward self – the mind lifts itself into a blurrily receptive state that is consciousness.
Does this solve the hard problem, or is it intellectual sleight-of-hand? Greene, who favours the “physicalist perspective”, is as wistful as he is hopeful. “That the mind can do all it does is extraordinary. That the mind may accomplish all it does with nothing more than the kinds of ingredients and types of forces holding together my coffee cup, makes it more extraordinary still.”
In this short space we have been able to sample only a few of the riches contained in this treasurable book. Greene looks at the world with a clear eye. For him, our finitude is at once our tragedy and our consolation. We are ephemeral, he writes, and “the enormous sweep of time only adds weight to the nearly unbearable lightness of being . . . Looking for the universe to hug us, its transient conscious squatters, is understandable, but that’s just not what the universe does. . . And so, in our quest to fathom the human condition, the only direction to look is inward.”
Why persist in existing, the poet Rilke asks, “when this span of life might be fleeted away / as laurel”? The answer he gives is at once straightforward and glorious, and it is one with which Brian Greene would surely concur:
“. . . because being here is much, and because all this
that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely
concerns us. Us, the most fleeting of all.”
John Banville’s latest book, writing as BW Black, is The Secret Guests
