Views from Crestmont Drive

Final post summarizing this Brian Greene book. Earlier: post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4.

The final three chapters return to the cosmic scope of the book’s overall theme, exploring what we’ve concluded about the far future and the possible end of the universe, and addresses the idea of ‘meaning.’ Plus some closing comments of my own.

Ch9, Duration and Impermanence: From the Sublime to the Final Thought, p244

In this chapter Greene speculates on the deep future, all the way to the final possibility of life, and thought. He employs a new way of representing deep time (somewhat analogous to Carl Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar”). He imagines the timeline of the universe as the floors of the Empire State Building. Each floor represents 10 times the number of years as the previous floor. Each single floor thus dwarfs all those below it. At 13.8by since the Big Bang, we’re just a few steps above floor 10.

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