Our Quest to Understand the Cosmos - Brian Greene in Conversation with Jo Marchant

How did the universe begin and how will it end?

To celebrate the launch of paperback edition of 'Until the End of Time', Brian Greene’s riveting exploration into the cosmos and our quest to understand it, join him in conversation with Jo Marchant

They will take us on a journey across time, starting from our most refined understanding of the universe’s beginning to the closest science can take us to the very end.

Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. Jo Marchant is a New York Times bestselling author and speaker.

This talk was recorded on 2 March 2021.

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[milesbiermaier]

Brian Greene should get his own show like Cosmos with Neil Degrasse Tyson. It would be epic, no it would be legendary!

[curedtheaddict]

I'm not an intellectual but I like the way Brian explains things it helps me get through it without a headache 😆

[mayflowerlash]

The feeling that life is futile can be compensated by an understanding that the probability that we each exist is vanishingly small. We should be grateful that we have won the lottery of life and bask in the wonder that we have life even if it is temporary. When we die we will not know we have died or even existed. It is only the fear of the process of dying that troubles us. Live your lives fully until your last moment, then go to sleep without fear of the future.

[tombock]

The thing about Dr Greene that has always amazed me....he speaks with no "extraneous" words. He communicates the most information, with the least amount of words, in the most direct and clear path possible, of any scientist I've listened to. An incredible skill to be this articulate.

[ImmyYousafzai]

I started with an intention to listen for 5 minutes. Before I realised it was 45 min gone.

[DrJeeps]

I could listen to Brian Greene for hours. Oh, wait, I already do. Also, thank you RI for your fascinating talks. This is what makes the internet so valuable.

[erikziak]

12:38 OK, so far I had some ideas, but this really kicked me. It is something I have been speculation at least since I read "The Big Picture" by Sean Carroll. I imagine the book by Brian to be something similar. Great, I have something to read! While I lack the rigorous mathematical skills to do the in-depth understanding of QM or General Relativity, I barely scratch the surface to be able to acknowledge the great minds who contributed to our understanding of the universe. While it remains sad that my own father is a conspiracy theorist and refuses to vaccinate for SARS-CoV-2, and he is by far not the only person I know, I see it inevitable and inseparable of our human existence to have people that simply refuse and reject the truth and build up their own. I would need a book to explain this thought in detail, this comment is certainly not the proper place to do so. But I want to stress one thing. I do not remember to what video it was, but a certain comment from a fellow YouTube commenter about entropy/free-will related topic made me think and I actually changed my mind. I updated my knowledge based on reasoning and am generally happy that this occurred and that I noticed it. It was years ago but I never did a public acknowledgement of this fact. So I am doing it now. This discussion, even being just 12 minutes in, is very intelligent and inspiring, it "infects" me with certain thoughts. I just had the urge to write this down. I am, after all, just a humble human being. Full of flaws, biases and "system 1" quick thinking schemes. We all are.

[PaulHattle]

Brian Greene is my favourite communicator. His books are always beautifully written.

[Seba_World]

Carlo Rovelli - Me eventually I know this italian physicist 2 years ago. "The Reality is not what it seems" - this book really changed the way I look at world now. Reading this kind of books changes your mind for sure. Cheers from Poland 🇵🇱

[erikziak]

59:24 Agreed. I can tell you a story, years ago, how I woke up in the morning, got out of bed, walked to the window, just to see a small kitten, driven over by a car, with it guts out on the street, still alive with is legs kicking, with the mother cat sitting besides it, next to my parked car.... All those thoughts I had, taking the lift downstairs, what I could/will do.... Lucky for me, the kitten was not moving anymore when I got to the car. But the mother cat sat besides it. Refusing to move. Forcing me to back up the car a couple of times to safely pass besides That is life.... And

[bilinguru]

One way of resolving the Hard Consciousness Problem, with regards to the story of Mary and whether she "learns something new" when seeing the color red for the first time, is to draw attention to the distinction between 'learning' something and 'experiencing' something. A baby doesn't consciously comprehend what colors or tastes are as much as they apprehend these sensations. If Mary is color blind, then there is a sensatory block of some sort, either in the color receptors in the eye or in the brain itself. It's a physical or experiential deficiency, not a cognitive deficit. One can make cognitive deductions that amount to conscious awareness without necessarily having access to the direct physical sensations attendant to them. Think of Helen Keller's deep insights, despite her physical limitations.

[MrBendybruce]

Although I've alwasy been involved in a technical and intellectual field, my genuine, interest in science only happened over the last few years, and I think Brian's comments touch strongly as the basis of why that interest has blossomed. I've seen perfectly healthy and happy individuals pass away with little or no warning, and after a while, one starts to be confronted with the fleeting and fragile nature of life itself. I realised, with considerable disappointment, how much time I've wasted on trivial self absorbed issues that did nothing to expand my consciousness, or tap into the potential to understand, and be filled with wonder about the deeper details of the reality we seem to live in. I think all humans have been gifted with a remarkable talent and intellect to be curious, and to seek answers to very difficult, but not always impossible, questions. We have a gift of the mind which may well be very rare, if not unique in the universe, so lets treasure it, respect it, and do our best to make the most of it while we still can.

[hireality]

A 👍 already at 07:25 when Brian Greene expanded Jo Marchant's leading question on Reductionism at 05:15. Brilliant talk, thank you both 🙂

[wuyqrbt]

One of the best science book I ever read, is *The Hidden Reality* by Professor Brian Greene, I love it.
As Sheldon said: *BIG FAN*
Happy to see you again, professor Greene.
Thanks Ri.

[rapauli]

Drat - I wanted to escape global warming by repealing the Laws of Thermodynamics. Looks like it is not possible. Thanks for this lecture.

[gilbertengler]

Just excellent. My God, Brian, you explain the things exactly how I feel them. Thanks a lot!
Concerning free will and consciousness; we have the “impression” to have free will just as we have the “impression” that we somehow feel that we are conscious, but this is just a feeling. A feeling or sensation is just a sum of a very large amount of different signals assembled in one package that translates into a particular value interpreted by our brain to correspond to a certain condition. If we would have no conscious feeling or sensation of free will, we would be able to do NOTHING with all the input information. It would be all “even physically” useless. However, I wonder why nature tends to create always more complex structures and why these stuctures finally end up in creating beings able to understand that nature. What is this “force” that drives this mechanism? Entropy is not enough and all the conservation laws neither. This “force” should also be fundamental and physical but mainly acting on complex structures.
They day that we will stop overestimating our life, we will not need religion anymore to feel comfort. Understanding more and more about the physical universe does the job much better.
Unfortunately to succeed in our society in this world, art and also science seem rather secondary and its all about giving a good but fake impression and making money. When will we finally realize that we are on the wrong track.

[PrmarySourc]

Hey Brian, check with David Deutsch on this! Constructor theory is your path forward, my friend. You’d help revolutionize physics by combining your excellent communication skills with the Universal Constructor.

[Rabbit-the-One]

Ok so THAT'S what exurb1a meant when he said, "maybe consciousness is inherent to matter." Now I better understand what that means, and no longer have to wonder what he was smoking when saying that.

[selliott]

My interest is music; instead of red think a perfect fifth! It holds an equally powerful emotional pull yet who can describe it? We are all mostly colour blind therefore. And that’s not to mention a diminished 6th and so on. Emotion comes down to dots on a page!

[edgarvalderrama]

I'm agnostic/atheist and a fan of Brian Greene but the only word I can think of for a low (or is it high?) entropy origin is "miracle!"
There are too many shaky assumptions necessary to blindly accept some of his "scientific" or philosophical reasonings.