Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • TIME

    String theorist Brian Greene wants to help you understand the cold, cruel universe

    Feb 21, 2020 5 minutes
    By Jeffrey Kluger

    IF YOU’RE FEELING ALL DREAMY ABOUT THE universe, here’s a pro tip: don’t tell Brian Greene. That guy can chill your cosmic buzz fast. I recently swung by the office of the Columbia University theoretical physicist full of happy, giddy questions and came away pretty much empty. Is there such a thing as a natural moral order? I wondered. Not in this universe, there isn’t. What about a purpose to the universe, then—the reason the whole 13.8 billion-year-old shebang with its hundreds of billions of galaxies and trillions of planets happened in the first place? Nope, Greene says, no such purpose, adding, “And that’s O.K.” Maybe for him it is.

    Surely, though, Greene will grant the existence of free will—that first item on the wish list of every freshman-year

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from TIME

    TIME2 min read
    What’s With All The Cicadas?
    More than a trillion noisy, inch-long (or larger) cicadas have surfaced from underground across much of the U.S. this spring, in a massive co-emergence that hasn’t been seen in more than 200 years. It was the first time since 1803—when Thomas Jeffers
    TIME2 min readPolitical Ideologies
    The Party Of Mandela Fails To Deliver
    The African National Congress has led South Africa’s government since the end of apartheid in 1994. But as voters go to the polls on May 29, there’s good reason to wonder whether the ANC might be in real trouble. During the ANC’s most recent term in
    TIME2 min read
    A Man In Full, Adapted And Redacted
    Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full is a massive book, in more ways than one. The 742-page social novel about a swaggering Atlanta real estate mogul, which took Wolfe over a decade to write, sold a jaw-dropping 1.4 million hardcover copies after its publicatio

    Related Books & Audiobooks