Clear In Vivid is sponsored by the Covley Foundation dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear In Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

You and I and everything in the world around us emerged through a sequence of quantum processes stretching all the way back to the big bang,

heading toward our existence today and each of those quantum processes could have turned out differently.

It could have turned out that way instead of this, yielding a universe in which neither you nor I or anybody else would be here.

And so it is spectacularly unlikely that we are here and therefore there's a deep sense of gratitude that I feel toward the universe for the mere fact of existence.

And it goes beyond just mere existence, we are not rocks, we're not stones, right?

Because of the power of evolution, we are so exquisitely ordered, our particle arrangement is so wonderfully configured that we can create beauty, right?

We can experience wonder, we can illuminate mystery, a member of our species wrote the ninth symphony, a member of our species wrote Hamlet.

I mean that's spectacular, the collection of particles governed by physical law can do that.

And that to me is where this whole story focuses our attention on the capacity of this mere collection of particles to do wondrous things.

That's Brian Green. Brian has spent his amazing careers as a physicist and communicator bringing the wonders of the cosmos into our lives.

His new book is called until the end of time, mind, matter and our search for meaning in an evolving universe.

And in that book he considers the trillions and trillions of particles that make up each of us and everything else in the universe.

And although it's all going to disappear someday, surprisingly, Brian finds meaning in the wonder of our very brief existence.

Our talk was scheduled to take place in front of an audience at the 92nd Street, Y in New York.

But like everybody else these days, we came face to face on computer screens rather than in person.

Our audience joined us remotely too, so be sure to stay with us for their questions instead of the seven that I usually ask at the end of each episode.

It's great to talk to you again, Brian. I always love it. I always have a great time. How's the way your new book is again about the cosmos, which to me has always seemed like a dark forbidding place punctuated by moments of destruction.

And yet you start this book with a personal point of view that you don't usually see in the book that makes the cosmos and mathematics and quantum mechanics makes it makes all that clear.

You're able to do something very personal.

I'll answer in a couple of ways. So first off, since this book is really a different kind of book than the previous science oriented books that I have written.

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