On being is brought to you by the John Templeton Foundation, harnessing the power of the sciences

to explore the deepest and most perplexing questions facing humankind.

Learn about the winner of this year's Templeton prize, Dr. Jane Goodall, whose discoveries

changed our understanding of humanity's role in an interconnected world at Templeton.org.

We could be living in a constant state of wonder at what science in this century is learning and

showing us about the cosmos and about ourselves, the new questions it's giving us to live.

We are the generation of our species to map the genome and the brain to detect black holes

colliding in here gravitational waves. And the physicist Brian Green is one of our greatest

interpreters from the human enterprise that is science. From his first wildly popular book

for a general audience, the elegant universe, he has manifests the fascinating trajectory of modern

physics from a focus on what we can see to quantum realms of string theory and the multiverse

to probing how our five senses are ill-equipped to sense the full nature of reality.

He is well known for his dismissal of the notion that human beings have free will in any

traditional understanding of that term. And yet in Brian Green's most recent thinking and writing,

there is a stunning evolution of his own approach to science and life and the matters of purpose and

meaning. So we are going to delve into his exuberant cosmic lens on living in the here and the now.

My view is the very fact that collections of particles can do the kinds of things that we can do.

The fact that you and I can have this conversation, the fact that in Einstein can work out the laws

of general relativity, the fact that a Shakespeare can write King Lear, the fact that particles

governed by physical law can do all that, that to me is the wonder of it all. That to me is where

it's thrilling. I'm Krista Tippett and this is on Being.

Brian Green is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, where he's also

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