“I see a pattern, but my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?” Albert Einstein (1953).

Firstly, I recommend Professor Greene’s interesting book Until The End of Time, along with others he has written. However, I found it useful to simultaneously read “The Order of Time” by Carlo Rovelli, which presents a melodic contrast. Secondly, please allow some meandering feedback and tangential thoughts it inspired as follows.

Professor Greene’s description and continued reference to entropy reminded me of the Twilight Zone episode entitled “A Penny For Your Thoughts” (available on YouTube) that depicts a low entropy event akin to his example of 50 coins being shaken and falling all heads or tails (pages 24-25). As he surmised something special is likely to be occurring, which the Twilight Zone episode concurs. Dr. Brian Cox relates another analogy with sand on a beach – it is conceivable that the wind might blow the sand in such a way as to create a low entropic event of a fully formed sand castle, but highly unlikely. It is more likely it will simply disperse the sand in higher entropic configurations that appear random to us.

On page 93 and elsewhere Professor Greene concludes that given all living things power themselves similarly, and given their shared DNA, “The immediate answer is that all life must have descended from a single ancestor…”. I scribbled in the margin “Or, a Creator!”. I likewise noted the recurring themes of natural selection and Darwinian evolution, the latter of which Darwin struggled with given the lack of archeological evidence of transitional species as “… the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory”. This was mitigated by the revival of Lamarck’s epigenetic concepts, though initially scoffed at, now providing renewed importance (see, for example, Lamarck’s Revenge by Peter Ward). Whereby, heritable evolutionary changes can happen within a single life span versus the previously assumed lengths of time passage.

I especially appreciated Professor Greene’s references and discussion on alternative philosophies, including Buddhism. His personal story of his brother’s self-reflective journey reminded me of being sixteen and spending a Summer devouring Sanskrit texts and attempting meditation. There was something especially beautiful about a language that told long stories based on a single word – for example, Maya, where a male student when asking to explain it, is told to dive into a nearby pond, upon entering the water he transforms to a girl, exiting, grows up, marries, has children, and sets up home in a large valley; a flood washes out the valley, as she reaches to save her children she begins to drown, upon her last breath she exits the pond and the master says “that is Maya”.

Outside of Dr. Greene’s books, I have attempted to watch “debates” between Professor Greene and other physicists (e.g. Roger Penrose, Eric Weinstein), but they quickly devolve into, from my perspective, semantic arguments, without any resultant net thoughts. I likewise find most presentations of information to be tunnel focused and missing the forest for the trees. In this regard, I do appreciate Professor Greene’s multi-varied approach in this book of referring to various disciplines including biology and philosophy. My sense is that this is a superior pathway to unlock answers, as no doubt knowledge in one area can inspire to another. While relegated as pseudo-science, Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds In Collision, and other works, attempted on a grand scale to achieve this – regardless of what one thinks of his analysis, the approach is interesting.

It is often indicated that Quantum Mechanics is the formulae of the very small, and Relativity of the large. At what scale does one to the other fail? Is there an area where neither work (aside from Black Holes)? It is also claimed that Dark Matter exists to explain something missing in current equations. I wonder what Dr. Greene and others think of concepts within William Sidis’s only work The Animate and Inanimate (1920 – freely available via the Internet in PDF) that proposed reversibility, which seems an alternative explanation, regardless not all his points may stand scrutiny. His concept challenges the accepted second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy in a closed system tends to increase over time. Sidis’s idea suggests that processes in the universe could be bi-directional, defying the arrow of time as commonly understood. To illustrate his theory, Sidis employed an analogy involving mirrors. When we look at a mirror, we observe a reflection of our world, where everything appears the same except for the reversal of one dimension of space, perpendicular to the mirror’s plane. Drawing upon this imagery, Sidis proposed that if time were considered an additional dimension, akin to the three dimensions of space, a “reverse universe” could exist. In this reverse universe, the dimension of time would be reversed, while the spatial dimensions would remain unaltered. As the Red Queen quipped “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Interestingly, in 2020 research by Lebedev and Vinokur “Time-reversal of an unknown quantum state” that “…opens the route for general universal algorithms sending temporal evolution of an arbitrary system backward in time.” opens up new possibilities. Perhaps William Sidis will one day receive a Nobel Prize posthumously, or in person, for his conjecture.

On page 325 Professor Greene states “As we hurtle toward a cold and barren cosmos, we must accept that there is no grand design.” Around the age of 19, on a beautiful Summer afternoon I came inside (my aunt and uncle’s home, where I was staying at the time), and felt an overwhelming sensation to lay down and sleep. I gave in to this, and lay on the living room chesterfield. I immediately went into a dream state, which seemed more of a vision than a typical dream. In this vision, I was walking in an open field, feeling the sun on my face, looking up at the cumulus clouds, and feeling very content. Suddenly I encountered Jesus Christ (I don’t know how I knew it was him, but that is what it represented to me in this vision), he was standing in front of me and speaking, speaking very quickly. However, it was in a foreign tongue and I didn’t understand what he was saying to me. I closed my eyes, and allowed myself to take in the words, without my conscious filter…instantly I understood him, and in this moment, I was transformed, there was no physical world anymore, I sensed I was a disembodied spirit, and realized there were other disembodied spirits, and we were somehow communicating with one another. Regardless this was dramatic, I was not frightened, and in fact “felt” at peace. What we were communicating had to do with the cycle of life, it occurred to me that we were discussing a “game”, that we would initiate this cycle of life, with the object of returning to this starting point. I soon awoke, and felt very calm. What did I experience, what meaning, if any, did it have? To me, this is the closest representation of what occurs after death within our comprehension. We are part of a self-determined cycle, purposely set out as experiential. This closely follows Buddhist beliefs, which may have influenced the vision, as I had previously (age 16) studied this. So, was the vision a manifestation of my Buddhist teachings, or a vision of “reality”, or both?

However maddening, to this point of knowledge, it seems we are destined to be as those depicted in the Twilight Zone’s episode “5 Characters in Search of an Exit”, able to struggle through obtaining knowledge within our universe, our bubble, but outside of that will never be known while living. If we were, as the Mind’s I (by Hofstadter and Dennett) surmises, we would instantly cease to exist. “It is better to travel well, than to arrive.” Buddha

Has Professor Greene’s words and others led me astray; more likely it is simply my own entropic process.

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