Which brian greene book to read first

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Ta-Nehisi Coates. Ann Miura-Ko. Tim Ferriss. Michael Pollan. Book recommendations coming soon! Books written by Brian Greene. People also viewed. Danah Boyd activist. Dominic D'Agostino activist. Lisa Randall activist. Roxane Gay activist. Peter Diamandis activist. Ed Cooke activist. Peter Attia activist.

Steven Pinker activist. I was just utterly disinterested in the topic at hand i. See all 4 questions about Until the End of Time….

Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Feb 26, Jen rated it really liked it. Are you the type of person who gets teary eyed from thinking about a cosmos studded with stars that are constantly engaged in thermonuclear bickering with a relentless gravitational crush? So, first things first.

Becker argued that much of the striving we do in life is motivated by the dichotomy between our ability to reach towards the divine while being creatures who go back into the dirt.

This cognitive dissonance, he reasoned, causes us to deploy our grandest creative strategies in the service of combating it.

In a similar fashion, this book covers key scientific insights in our ongoing quest to discover our place in the cosmos, and reconcile the knowledge of not only our own impermanence, but that of the universe as well. Evolution by natural selection. Speculation on the antecedents of DNA. The central importance of Redox Reactions in metabolizing pie, and Black Holes.

For me, as a person who, while not religious, does experience awe in the way that Einstein captured in his more deistic scribblings, I found it highly enjoyable, and would recommend it to anyone with a similar disposition.

Greene, as usual, writes in a witty and accessible style, and adopts an appropriately humble and open minded position when it comes to the big questions. View all 12 comments. Apr 06, Jenna rated it liked it Shelves: cogito-ergo-sum , science-matters , non-fiction. In the end, during our brief moment in the sun, we are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.

Well, this was a bit of a train wreck. It started out interesting. I was really into the first 3 chapters, especially the third, "Origins and Entropy". After that, as another reviewer ironically noted, the book itself appears to suffer an increase in entr "In the search for value and purpose, the only insights of relevance, the only answers of significance, are those of our own making.

After that, as another reviewer ironically noted, the book itself appears to suffer an increase in entropy. Brian Greene is a theoretical physicist but in this book he veers off into philosophy and linguistics and sociology and other sciences.

It was all over the place. It seemed to me that Mr. Greene decided to write a book about the future of the universe using his speciality of physics, but then found he had only enough material for a few chapters. Therefore, perhaps at the insistence of his publisher, he decided to add more chapters by discussing other scientific fields he has read up on. And he lost me. Perhaps it was simply that I was really wanting some cold hard facts, something that would require my brain to let go of every other thought and just focus on what I was reading.

Something that would give my brain some structure for a time. Some people escape through reading with books that don't require any or much thought.

That doesn't work for me. In order to escape reality and who doesn't want to escape a little during a pandemic?! I need a book that demands total attention. A book that engages my grey matter sufficiently that I let go of all my present worries. Books on this subject are often my ticket to escape. Unfortunately, this particular one just didn't do it. It meandered and so did my thoughts. Though it sometimes talked of complex physics, it more often talked about things that didn't require my full attention.

I do appreciate that it doesn't require a background in complex mathematics as some physics books do. It's easy to understand, though I found there to be far too many explanations and examples for just about everything.

I got it the first time, I kept thinking; now the additional examples just gives my brain cells room to think obsess! I'm no mathematician but I'll just do a rough estimate and average it out to 3 stars.

View all 21 comments. But many believe they can use language not just to build bridges but to tell the rest of us about ultimate reality. Descartes used language to prove the reality of his own existence in his famous Cogito Ergo Sum. Greene considers himself a reformed reductionist - that is, someone who used to believe in one fundamental story about reality.

He now believes that the scientific stories by chemists, physicists, and biologists are not the only stories that are meaningful. A non-scientist who reads novels, biographies, and poetry can only agree.

What matters for him is that the stories that are told are increasingly consistent and coherent with each other. It is unclear how he proposes to compare, say, Finnegans Wake and the second law of Thermodynamics for consistency and coherence. Nevertheless, this is his measure not just of scientific progress but also of human cultural development. The story he likes best because of its inclusiveness is that of gravity and entropy. The way he tells it, gravity is the force which sparked the entire cosmos in the Big Bang.

A small and statistically unlikely perturbation in the microscopic ball of proto-energy caused that extremely low entropy ball to expand in a billionth of a second to a universe billions of light years in size. The photons and other nuclear material contained in the original singularity are spread through newly existing high-entropy space virtually instantaneously. Ever since, gravity and entropy have been in a continuous battle, driving not just the creation and destruction of galaxies, stars and planets, but also the life that has emerged on the latter, including us.

We are little islands of relatively low entropy, contributing the best we can to the eventual heat-death of the universe. Great story. Gravity, as I understand it, is a perturbation of space-time. Did space-time exist before the Big Bang? If not, how can gravity be its motivating factor? Entropy is not a force or a substance but a descriptive condition.

Is he condescending to popular usage or just being sloppy? But just when things start to get really hot, Greene changes the subject. According to this story, if the universe is expanding forever, entropy is the winner of the cosmic game and the universe is effectively eternal. On the other hand, if there is an ultimate cosmic collapse, gravity triumphs.

So the whole process would start again - and crucially not from the same place as the Big Bang. But this too implies eternity. Eternity bothers me because it points to something beyond language. But I despair when someone like Greene thinks that this will improve our understanding of reality. It may help us to stop persecuting each other; it will certainly result in faster, more powerful, and more varied machines and products of all sorts.

But it will get us no closer to reality, to that which is permanently beyond language. View all 13 comments. Feb 18, Brian Clegg rated it liked it. Things start well with this latest title from Brian Greene: after a bit of introductory woffle we get into an interesting introduction to entropy. As always with Greene's writing, this is readable, chatty and full of little side facts and stories.

Unfortunately, for me, the book then suffers something of an increase in entropy itself as on the whole it then veers more into philosophy and the soft sciences than Greene's usual physics and cosmology. So, we get chapters on consciousness, language, b Things start well with this latest title from Brian Greene: after a bit of introductory woffle we get into an interesting introduction to entropy.

So, we get chapters on consciousness, language, belief and religion, instinct and creativity, duration and impermanence, the ends of time and, most cringe-making as a title, 'the nobility of being'. Unlike the dazzling scientific presentation I expect, this mostly comes across as fairly shallow amateur philosophising. Of course it's perfectly possible to write good science books on, say, consciousness or language - but though Greene touches on the science, there far too much that's more hand-waving.

And good though he is at explaining physics, I'm not sure Greene is the right person for the job of dealing with these softer subjects.

Overall, despite the problems I had with it, it's a slick, well-written book, but it's not what I want from a popular science title - too subjective, too flowery and lacking the sense of wonder and fascination I want from good science writing. It may well appeal if touchy-feely is your thing, and Greene continues to add in little scientific asides as he goes, but I'm afraid I lost interest in a big way.

It often seems that science writers have to get one 'inner feelings' kind of book off their chest: hopefully Greene can now return to what he does best. View all 7 comments. Oct 10, Barbara rated it really liked it. Brian Greene is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist who writes books about science for the general public.

Author Brian Greene In this tome, Greene contemplates the universe, from it's inception to it's inevitable demise. Greene writes, "Planets and stars and solar systems and galaxies and even black holes are transitory. The end of each is driven by its own distinctive combination of physical processes, spanning quantum mechanics through general relativity, ultim Brian Greene is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist who writes books about science for the general public.

The end of each is driven by its own distinctive combination of physical processes, spanning quantum mechanics through general relativity, ultimately yielding a mist of particles drifting through a cold and quiet cosmos. On the other hand, the end for an individual living creature - like a human being - is much closer. Greene suggests that the knowledge of inevitable death drives people to leave a mark, to accomplish something that lasts beyond themselves.

This may be the impetus that inspires scientists, scholars, artists, musicians, writers, etc. In fact it's what drives Greene himself. He writes, "I've gone forward with an eye trained on the long view, on seeking to accomplish something that would last. Greene notes, "The second law describes a fundamental characteristic inherent in all matter and energy, regardless of structure or form, whether animate or inanimate.

The law reveals loosely that everything in the universe has an overwhelming tendency to run down, to degrade, to wither. Greene provides simple examples to demonstrate this. For instance, if you vigorously shake coins and throw then down, it's a hundred billion billion billion times more likely that you'll get 50 heads and 50 tails a high entropy, low order configuration rather than all heads or all tails a low entropy, high order configuration.

So going from the past to the future, entropy is overwhelmingly likely to increase. You may ask, 'How then did organized things like stars, planets, bacteria, rhododendrons, dogs, humans, etc. Greene explains that temporary organization occurs via the entropic two-step, which is a "process in which the entropy of a system decreases because it shifts a more than compensating increase in entropy to the environment.

A burning question for scientists, philosophers and much of the general public is 'How did life begin? The particles themselves slowly formed after the Big Bang, eventually organizing into proto DNA-like molecules that could reproduce themselves Greene explains all this in detail, and - for me - was among the most interesting parts of the book. As masses of particles that follow universal laws, do we have free will, unlike a rock for example?

This is a question of great interest to many philosophers and scientists. Greene observes that, "as living creatures [our] particles are so spectacularly ordered, so breathtakingly configured, that they can undertake exquisitely choreographed motions that are not possible for [rocks].

Greene is a bit murky about this, and I would have liked a better explanation. For instance, animal life advanced from single celled organisms, to primitive creatures like sponges, to more complex organisms like fish, to land animals like salamanders, and on and on to VERY intelligent primates us. Greene has brought an absorbing field of inquiry to vivid life. How the Higgs Boson Was Found Smithsonian magazine, July Before the elusive particle could be discovered—a smashing success—it had to be imagined.