#1428 - Brian Greene

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Three, two, one. Brian Greene, ladies and gentlemen. How are you, sir?

Brian Greene (0:04)

Good, thank you. How are you?

Joe Rogan (0:05)

Thanks for doing this, man. Oh, it's my pleasure. I've enjoyed your work for many, many, many years. So I really appreciate you coming in here.

Brian Greene (0:11)

Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Joe Rogan (0:13)

And like I was telling you, I just started your new book.

Brian Greene (0:15)

And how's it going?

Joe Rogan (0:16)

It's going well. It hasn't confused the shit out of me yet, but I know it's coming.

Brian Greene (0:19)

It will be coming. No doubt, no doubt.

Joe Rogan (0:22)

With all your work. So the beginning of time, the beginning of the universe to the end, that's essentially what you're summarizing.

Brian Greene (0:31)

Yeah, that's the backdrop to the entire narrative of the book. I basically want the reader to get a feel for the whole thing. How it started, how things like you and me rise up, how consciousness emerges, issues of free will and whether we have it, and then on to the future. What's gonna happen to us and the world and the universe as time elapses to the far, far future?

Joe Rogan (0:57)

It's, I'm just getting to the part where you're talking about how entropy and evolution sort of co-mingle to create life. And when you think of entropy, a lot of people think of something dissolving into chaos.

Brian Greene (1:11)

Yeah, exactly.

Joe Rogan (1:12)

But that's not necessarily the case.

Brian Greene (1:14)

It's only part of the story. I mean, entropy kind of gets a bad rap, right? It's the thing that you want to avoid, but somehow the laws of physics don't allow you to avoid it. It's this disintegration, it's this decay, it's this drive toward disorder.

And that's kind of true. But the reality of the situation is more subtle because overall entropy needs to go up. But that doesn't mean there can't be little pockets of order that form along the way. And in fact, the universe is incredibly clever. Stars, the ubiquitous feature of the heavens, they are pockets of order that naturally form, but as they form, they increase the entropy in the surroundings.

So the net entropy goes up even though this beautiful, orderly, bright object in the sky appears. And it's only because of the appearance of stars that the universe is an interesting place. Without stars, the particles of the universe would just disperse, the universe would get bigger and bigger, colder and colder, and that would be it. There wouldn't be any structure in the universe if it wasn't for the force of gravity.

Joe Rogan (2:18)

Stars themselves, just the fact that they exist, is very strange, that you have this thing, and ours is fairly small, right? It's a million times larger than Earth, and it's going to burn for billions of years, and it's just hovering there.

And it creates all the life. Literary is responsible for all the life. And when they supernova, that creates the actual ingredients for life, which is even more strange. Like you can't have biological carbon-based life if it's not for a star exploding.

Brian Greene (2:48)

Yeah, I mean, we often, in a poetic way, say that we are made of star stuff. I guess that was Carl Sagan's. But you can also say that we are made of nuclear refuse, right? We are the detritus that the death throes of a star puts out into the universe, and it rains down on planets, and at least on one such planet, that stuff comes together and yields life.

So it is a cycle. I mean, I don't wanna sound like the Lion King here, but you know, that's really what it is.

Joe Rogan (3:16)

Well, what I'm so interested about in getting into your book is the fact that you are sort of detailing all these steps that have to take place in order for all this life, in order for this universe to be what it is, and then where it's going to go.

Brian Greene (3:30)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the remarkable thing, and sort of the main point at some level is that, look, we're special entities. We can think, we can reflect, we have emotions, but ultimately, you and I and everybody else were just bags of particles that are governed by physical law.

And so there's this continuity between the stuff of the world, the inanimate stuff of the world, the inanimate stuff of the heavens, and us. We all come from the same fundamental ingredients and the same fundamental laws. Now, some people find that that gives them, I don't know, a sense of desperation, a sense that we're not special, a sense that somehow the universe is pointless or meaningless.