Brian Greene on Seeing Humanity in the Context of the Cosmos

The J.Rogan experience. As you write more and more books, do you find it to be more and more difficult or do you find it to be easier? Well, my early books were all focused on trying to bring scientific ideas out to the general public. You know, the Elgin universe was about string theory, fabric of the cosmos, space and time, hidden realities about multiple universes. And so in that role, I'm basically trying to translate from the cutting edge research into ordinary human language so that people who don't want to go to graduate school can get the basic idea of what's going on. And this book is a very different proposition. I feel like I've moved in a significantly different direction through this book because yes, there's science, you know, entropy, evolution, the history of the universe from the beginning to the end, but the focus on why we humans do what we do, why we tell stories, the emergence of language, why we tell myths, why we engage in religious experience, why creative expression is so important to us. This felt like it was drawing upon things I've been thinking about for decades, but never put into writing. So it was a harder exercise than anything that I did before because it was a different exercise. But in the end, one that I felt was even more gratifying because it was making clear why these ideas matter. As opposed to just trying to tickle the brain of the reader, I'm trying to actually, if you will, touch the heart and soul of the reader. And that's something which, if it's successful, feels very gratifying. I would imagine that would be very hard to end, to feel how, like, to put the cover on it and to go, that's it. Yeah, right, it is. But that's true almost with all books. You know, the famous adage is that you never finish a book, you abandon them. That's all that ever happens. And that was true in spades in this particular case because the subject was so big. And you can always imagine going further in this direction or enhancing that description. But at some point, you recognize that, you know, life is an ongoing process. And a book is ultimately a snapshot of where the author was at the moment that the book was written. And that, to me, is really what happens here. This is a snapshot of my view of the human conditions set against the cosmological unfolding. And how much of your perceptions of these things has evolved, you know, as an educator and as a scientist and as a person who's in the public eye. How much of your perceptions on these ideas have changed over the course of your career? Huge, huge. I think I was a very hard-nosed science thinker when I started at, I think part of this may have been I became a professor at a relatively young age. I think it was 27 when I got my first faculty job. So many of the graduate students were the same age as me. So I think I felt the need to have a very rigid scientific outlook on the world because of that. And, you know, as I've gotten older, that has changed. And my willingness to entertain a broader range of thought and experience and ways of being has absolutely grown. The other thing that's had a vast and vital impact on me are students. You know, for 30 years, the only thing I really taught was technical physics courses, quantum mechanics or relativity, you know, thermodynamics. And what do you do there? You're at the blackboard, you're putting equations up there, you're trying to get the kids to be able to solve problems and understand what the mathematics is all about. So the only thing you're really ever doing is touching the cognitive part of their brain. For the last few years, I've been teaching a course, the students didn't know it, that's actually based on this book. So I wanted to try out the ideas with young minds. So I taught a course at Columbia called Origins and Meaning. And in that course, I had students from across the campus, not just the physics students, at the neuro students, the anthropology students, the linguistics students, the theologically orange, you know, so it was a whole range of students. And to see how their understanding of how their major or subject fits in to the cosmological unfolding changed many of their perspectives on what it is that they're studying and what they're doing. And to have students come to my office, and to feel shooken up, shaken up, whatever the right form of that verb is, where they're saying, you know, I've lived my life in such a way, but now when I think about religion as perhaps an evolutionarily interesting and useful development, as opposed to something from on high, or when I think about creative expression as something that might seed ingenuity and innovation, as opposed to something that is just pure inspiration coming from the outer world. I'm thinking about my life differently. And some of them, frankly, would be upset. I'd had students come in tears. And I'd never had them when I teach quantum mechanics, you know, yeah, more than one, more than one, because they'd say, this course is kind of shaking my sense of who I am and what I am in the world. What was the key aspect of it that was shaking them? Well, for some students, it was the notion of religion, because many of them, or at least some of them, had a traditional religious upbringing, and their academic life and their religious life were completely separate. And now when you have a course in which you're focusing upon how it would be that this institution of religion might naturally evolve on planet Earth based upon what we know about humans and human brains and the evolutionary pressures that we've been under, some of them began to think about religion as a very different proposition than the one that they had when they were growing up. And I was in a position that I'd never been before, of basically counseling a student and saying, hey, it's okay to have your world shake a little bit. It's okay to think about things. You may come back to exactly where you were before this course, but if a collection of ideas can make you rethink your life, at least it'll cast it in a different light. It'll illuminate it differently. Go with it. See what happens. And I never had a conversation like that when teaching Schrodinger's equation. And for me, it was the most gratifying pedagogical experience that I've ever had, because you're reaching the whole person as opposed to just reaching this cognitive technique of solving equations. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.