브라이언 그린 (2020) 엔드 오브 타임 - 세상의 시작과 진화, 그리고 끝

책소개

2020년 美 아마존 과학 분야 1위! 물리학자 김상욱 “멋지다 못해 경외감까지 느껴진다!” 우주, 태양계, 지구 그리고 생명체는 어떻게 존재하게 되었는지 고찰하고, 더 나아가 의식의 진화와 인간 존재의 의미, 우주의 종말까지 아우르는 이 시대 최고의 Pop Science 걸작, 드디어 번역 출간

『엘러건트 유니버스』『우주의 구조』등 수 년 마다 명저를 집필하며, 칼 세이건 이후 최고의 ‘대중 과학 전도사’로 불린 브라이언 그린이 10여 년 만에 새 책을 썼다. 미국 현지에서는 『Until The End of Time』이란 제목으로 2020년 출간되어 즉각 아마존 과학 분야 1위를 차지하는 등 이미 크게 화제된 바 있다. 미래엔 와이즈베리는 카이스트 출신 과학전문 번역가 박병철 박사에게 의뢰해 장장 1년여에 걸친 고된 번역작업 끝에 한국어판 『엔드 오브 타임』을 출간했다.

『엔드 오브 타임』에는 우주를 이해하기 위해 노력해 왔던 인간의 역사가 고스란히 담겨 있다. 우주의 시공간은 상상을 초월할 정도로 방대하지만, 아주 우아하고 단순한 수학 법칙을 따른다. 그린은 이 법칙을 토대로 우주의 시작부터 마지막 순간까지 우리를 안내한다. 초기의 혼돈 속에서 생명은 어떻게 태어났으며, 단명(短命)의 운명을 깨닫게 된 인간은 어떻게 모든 경험에 의미를 부여하게 되었는가? 저자는 수많은 이야기와 신화, 종교, 창조적 표현, 그리고 과학을 통해 진실을 찾고 영원을 향한 인간의 갈망을 분석한다. 우주 만물은 언젠가 붕괴되어 사라질 운명이지만, 우리가 겪는 경이롭고 심오한 경험과 인간 스스로 창조한 아름다움 속에 그 해답이 들어있다.

DONE 2024-08-14 문서 변환 및 서문 리딩

과학은 이 차가운 우주에서 생겨난 인간의 ‘의식’을 설명할 수 있을까?

원서 기준으로 잘 정리해서 넣었다. 아 인공지능이야! 못 읽을 정보는 없다. 사실 그렇다. 원서로 읽는 것이 더 아름답다. 다만 영어의 맥을 잃지 않아야 한다. 맥이 무엇인가? 어떻게 읽어야 하는가? 어떻게 도움을 받는가 공부를 하는가? 서문을 정리 해보려고 한다. 이왕 시작하는 것 말이다. 읽으려면 진행 상황이 필요하지 않겠는가?!

PROG 서문 Preface

• 어노테이션을 테스트 해 봅니다.
• 좋아요. 그렇다면 글을 봅니다. 단어를 중심으로 본다.

이 글을 본다. 나는 좋다. 읽을 때 무엇이 문제인가? 영어? 단어 표현? 그렇다면 다 처리하도록 넣어보자. 아참! 문법:말이다. 잊었다만.

#영문법: 이게 여기 왜 나오지?

좋아. 여기에 흔적들을 남긴다. 내용에 집중하자.

“I do mathematics because once you prove a theorem, it stands. Forever.” ¹ The statement, simple and direct, was startling. I was a sophomore in college and had mentioned to an older friend, who for years had taught me vast areas of mathematics, that I was writing a paper on human motivation for a psychology course I was taking. His response was transformative. Until then, I hadn’t thought about mathematics in terms even remotely similar. To me, math was a wondrous game of abstract precision played by a peculiar community who would delight at punch lines turning on square roots or dividing by zero. But with his remark, the cogs suddenly clicked. Yes, I thought. That is the romance of mathematics. Creativity constrained by logic and a set of axioms dictates how ideas can be manipulated and combined to reveal unshakable truths. Every right-angled triangle drawn from before Pythagoras and on to eternity satisfies the famous theorem that bears his name. There are no exceptions. Sure, you can change the assumptions and find yourself exploring new realms, such as triangles drawn on a curved surface like the skin of a basketball, which can upend Pythagoras’s conclusion. But fix your assumptions, double-check your work, and your result is ready to be chiseled in stone. No climbing to the mountaintop, no wandering the desert, no triumphing over the underworld. You can sit comfortably at a desk and use paper, pencil, and a penetrating mind to create something timeless.

The perspective opened my world. I had never really asked myself why I was so deeply attracted to mathematics and physics. Solving problems, learning how the universe is put together—that’s what had always captivated me. I now became convinced that I was drawn to these disciplines because they hovered above the impermanent nature of the everyday. However overblown my youthful sensibilities rendered my commitment, I was suddenly sure I wanted to be part of a journey toward insights so fundamental that they would never change. Let governments rise and fall, let World Series be won and lost, let legends of film, television, and stage come and go. I wanted to spend my life catching a glimpse of something transcendent.

In the meantime, I still had that psychology paper to write. The assignment was to develop a theory of why we humans do what we do, but each time I started writing, the project seemed decidedly nebulous. If you clothed reasonable-sounding ideas in the right language it seemed that you could pretty much make it up as you went along. I mentioned this over dinner at my dorm and one of the resident advisors suggested I take a look at Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. A German historian and philosopher, Spengler had an abiding interest in both mathematics and science, no doubt the very reason his book had been recommended.

The aspects responsible for the book’s fame and scorn—predictions of political implosion, a veiled espousal of fascism—are deeply troubling and have since been used to support insidious ideologies, but I was too narrowly focused for any of this to register. Instead, I was intrigued by Spengler’s vision of an all-encompassing set of principles that would reveal hidden patterns playing out across disparate cultures, on par with the patterns articulated by calculus and Euclidean geometry that had transformed understanding in physics and mathematics.² Spengler was talking my language. It was inspiring for a text on history to revere math and physics as a template for progress. But then came an observation that caught me thoroughly by surprise: “Man is the only being that knows death; all others become old, but with a consciousness wholly limited to the moment which must seem to them eternal,” knowledge that instills the “essentially human fear in the presence of death.” Spengler concluded that “every religion, every scientific investigation, every philosophy proceeds from it.”³

I remember dwelling on the last line. Here was a perspective on human motivation that made sense to me. The enchantment of a mathematical proof might be that it stands forever. The appeal of a law of nature might be its timeless quality. But what drives us to seek the timeless, to search for qualities that may last forever? Perhaps it all comes from our singular awareness that we are anything but timeless, that our lives are anything but forever. Resonating with my newfound thinking on math, physics, and the allure of eternity, this felt on target. It was an approach to human motivation grounded in a plausible reaction to a pervasive recognition. It was an approach that didn’t make it up on the fly.

As I continued to think about this conclusion, it seemed to promise something grander still. Science, as Spengler noted, is one response to the knowledge of our inescapable end. And so is religion. And so is philosophy. But, really, why stop there? According to Otto Rank, an early disciple of Freud who was fascinated by the human creative process, we surely shouldn’t. The artist, in Rank’s assessment, is someone whose “creative impulse…attempts to turn ephemeral life into personal immortality.”⁴ Jean-Paul Sartre went farther, noting that life itself is drained of meaning “when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.”⁵ The suggestion, then, threading its way through these and other thinkers who followed, is that much of human culture—from artistic exploration to scientific discovery—is driven by life reflecting on the finite nature of life.

Deep waters. Who knew that a preoccupation with all things mathematics and physics would tap into visions of a unified theory of human civilization driven by the rich duality of life and death?

Well, OK. I’ll take a breath as I remind my long-ago sophomore self not to get too carried away. Nonetheless, the excitement I felt proved more than a passing wide-eyed intellectual wonderment. In the nearly four decades since, these themes, often simmering on a mental back burner, have stayed with me. While my day-to-day work has pursued unified theories and cosmic origins, in ruminating on the larger significance of scientific advances I have found myself returning repeatedly to questions of time and the limited allotment we are each given. Now, by training and temperament, I’m skeptical of one-size-fits-all explanations—physics is littered with unsuccessful unified theories of nature’s forces—only more so if we venture into the complex realm of human behavior. Indeed, I have come to see my awareness of my own inevitable end as having considerable influence but not providing a blanket explanation for everything I do. It’s an assessment, I imagine, that to varying degrees is common. Still, there is one domain in which mortality’s tentacles are particularly evident.

Across cultures and through the ages, we have placed significant value on permanence. The ways we have done so are abundant: some seek absolute truth, others strive for enduring legacies, some build formidable monuments, others pursue immutable laws, and others still turn with fervor toward one or another version of the everlasting. Eternity, as these preoccupations demonstrate, has a powerful pull on the mind aware that its material duration is limited.

In our era, scientists equipped with the tools of experiment, observation, and mathematical analysis have blazed a new trail toward the future, one that for the first time has revealed prominent features of the eventual if still far-off landscape-to-be. Although obscured by mist here and fog there, the panorama is becoming sufficiently clear that we cogitating creatures can glean more fully than ever before how we fit into the grand expanse of time.

It is in this spirit, in the pages that follow, that we will walk the timeline of the universe, exploring the physical principles that yield orderly structures from stars and galaxies to life and consciousness, within a universe destined for decay. We will consider arguments establishing that much as human beings have limited life spans, so too do the very phenomena of life and mind in the universe. Indeed, at some point it is likely that organized matter of any kind will not be possible. We will examine how self-reflective beings contend with the tension entailed in these realizations. We emerge from laws that, as far as we can tell, are timeless, and yet we exist for the briefest moment of time. We are guided by laws that operate without concern for destination, and yet we constantly ask ourselves where we are headed. We are shaped by laws that seem not to require an underlying rationale, and yet we persistently seek meaning and purpose.

In short, we will survey the universe from the beginning of time to something akin to the end, and through the journey explore the breathtaking ways in which restless and inventive minds have illuminated and responded to the fundamental transience of everything.

We will be guided in the exploration by insights from a variety of scientific disciplines. Through analogies and metaphors, I explain all necessary ideas in nontechnical terms, presuming only the most modest background. For particularly challenging concepts, I provide brief summaries that allow you to move on without losing the trail. In the endnotes I explain finer points, spell out particular mathematical details, and provide references and suggestions for further reading.

Because the subject is vast and our pages limited, I have chosen to walk a tight path, pausing at various junctures I consider essential for recognizing our place within the larger cosmological story. It is a journey powered by science, given significance by humanity, and the source of a vigorous and enriching adventure.

Related-Notes

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