Equations of Eternity, Speculations on Consciousness, Meaning, and the Mathematical Rules That Orchestrate the Cosmos

You are roughly eighteen billion years old and made of matter that has been cycled through the multimillion-degree heat of innumerable giant stars. You are composed of particles that once were scattered across thousands of light-years of interstellar space, particles that were blasted out of exploding suns and that for eons drifted through the cold, starlit vacuum of the Galaxy. You are very much a child of the cosmos.

In giving birth to us, the universe has performed its most astonishing cr...