| From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time |  | Author: Sean Carroll
Publisher: DUTTON ADULT
Category: eBooks
This item is no longer available
Rating:  45 reviews
Sales Rank: 13,463
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 448
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.11
Publication Date: November 6, 2009
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Product Description
A rising star in theoretical physics offers his awesome vision of our universe and beyond, all beginning with a simple question: Why does time move forward?
Time moves forward, not backward-everyone knows you can't unscramble an egg. In the hands of one of today's hottest young physicists, that simple fact of breakfast becomes a doorway to understanding the Big Bang, the universe, and other universes, too. In From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll argues that the arrow of time, pointing resolutely from the past to the future, owes its existence to conditions before the Big Bang itself-a period modern cosmology of which Einstein never dreamed. Increasingly, though, physicists are going out into realms that make the theory of relativity seem like child's play. Carroll's scenario is not only elegant, it's laid out in the same easy-to- understand language that has made his group blog, Cosmic Variance, the most popular physics blog on the Net.
From Eternity to Here uses ideas at the cutting edge of theoretical physics to explore how properties of spacetime before the Big Bang can explain the flow of time we experience in our everyday lives. Carroll suggests that we live in a baby universe, part of a large family of universes in which many of our siblings experience an arrow of time running in the opposite direction. It's an ambitious, fascinating picture of the universe on an ultra-large scale, one that will captivate fans of popular physics blockbusters like Elegant Universe and A Brief History of Time.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 45
 Astrophysic and philosophy September 2, 2010
Rosalia
Very well and pleasantly written. Understandable for non expert readers. Thought inspiring. Some redundancy with arguments and explanations serves well the purpose of being clear and reminding what the point in question is. Excellent.
 The arrow of time goes ... nowhere August 30, 2010
D. A. Ross (Minneapolis, Minnesota USA)
When presenting a difficult, dense topic -- that of time, entropy, quantum mechanics, mathematics, physics, relativity, etc. -- the challenge of effectively communicating with the average reader becomes the author's ultimate hurdle. Early in chapter one, it was quite evident Sean Carroll was not going to live up to the challenge.
Dr. Carroll, though clearly brilliant in his field of physics and full of elegant, probing ideas, is not a writer (I will concede he is an academic writer, at best). Writing about scientific subjects in an entertaining way, without dumb-ing down the material, can be done, as evidenced by the likes of Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene and Carl Sagan, just to name a few. That being said, this book was more of a burden to read than it needed to be.
From Eternity to Here is certainly not without its merits. Dr. Carroll does offer deeply insightful ideas and speculations on the subject of time and its dependence upon entropy; and those with more than a lay interest in the sciences (meaning, those who pursued science as a career) may find the book intriguing. But be prepared to wade through repetitive, overly long, scattered writing, that ultimately leads to ... well, nowhere -- which seems a somewhat fitting ending for a book about the arrow of time.
 This Book Is a Mess August 27, 2010
Karl V. Stein
This book is a mess, but so is all of theoretical physics and its new best friend--cosmology. Dr. Carroll writes very well and is quite well read outside of physics. The book is an easy read, but as other reviewers have pointed out it is ultimately empty. Dr. Carroll's thesis seems to be that entropy explains the direction of the arrow of time. He does a wonderful job of discussing classical entropy. His discussion about the entropy of black holes was well done. However, he never is able to directly connect the arrow of time and entropy. Just because they travel on the same road does not mean that they are related.
For example, entropy presumably increases dramatically at the formation of a black hole, but time does not speed up elsewhere. Entropy increases very slowly when only black holes remain in the universe but time does not slow down. Time does seem to reverse very briefly during some particle accelerator collisions, but entropy does not decease. I am referring to the CPT theorum which Carrol does not discuss.
In addition to the CPT theorum Dr. Carrol neglects to discuss causality issues in any depth, fails to discuss cosmologies that do not use time, and neglects to discuss the meaning of time at the singularity of a black hole. Like all well trained physicists he is too quick to agree with Drs Suskind and Hawkins that information is preserved after it falls into the black hole. I bought the book expecting this question to be discussed more fully, but it was dismissed all too quickly with a hand wave about Hawkins' radiation.
In summary, there is enough good material in this book for a magazine article, but the majority of it is fluff.
Too Little Too Late August 13, 2010
Robert Carlberg (Seattle)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Unfortunately... I made the mistake of thinking this book was by the author of Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo, which was one of the most important and enlightening books I've read in a decade. It really impressed me that an evolutionary biologist could also have written a book on the riddle of time, and I really looked forward to reading his intelligent insights.
Unfortunately... that was Sean B. Carroll -- and this book is by Sean M. Carroll, a Cal Tech theoretical physicist and cosmologist six years his junior. Like B., M. is also an engaging writer, with a fluid lighthearted style and a carefully-drafted arc to the book, leading the reader along to the conclusions with lots of supporting documentation. As writers, both authors are excellent.
Unfortunately... From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time -- despite the title and subtitle -- has almost NOTHING to say about time. This is a book on cosmology and theoretical physics, and the first eleven chapters contain nothing you wouldn't find in a standard high school textbook. All of the same old arguments, diagrams and examples are trotted out, which would be fine if this was the only physics book I'd ever read... but it's not. I've read Asimov and Rucker and Dyson and Gribbin and Kaku and Thorne (and MOND by Moti Milgrom) and a really good book on theoretical cosmology called Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation and another really good book called The Riddle of Gravitation: Revised and Updated Edition -- any of which I would recommend before this one. Although the author's tone is lighthearted and congenial, his physics is strictly mainstream, strictly orthodoxy and strictly non-negotiable.
Fortunately... things get more interesting with chapters 12-15, where the author exits textbook mode and describes some of the more controversial theories floating around. He talks about quantum gravity and 5-dimensional anti-de Sitter spaces and Hawking radiation and quantum string theory, and the ambient temperature of the writing goes way up. Although he belabors some of the examples you can tell he's much more interested in the fringes of research than what is considered settled orthodoxy. On page 328 he writes, "It's breathtaking to look into the sky at the distribution of galaxies through space, and imagine that they originated in quantum fluctuations when the universe was a fraction of a second old." Too bad that poetic vision wasn't the beginning of his exploration, instead of the end.
And like I said, the huge riddles of time (the ostensible subject of this book) remain unexplored. Why does the singularity inside a black hole suck in matter, while the singularity inside the Big Bang supposedly spewed out everything we see? If time slows under the influence of extreme gravity (as near a black hole), what does that say about the speed of light right after the Big Bang? If the passage of time is variable, what does that mean for the red shift of distant galaxies? Since time moves at the speed of light (per Einstein's General Relativity) what does it mean to speak of the "age" of the visible universe? If space itself is expanding along with the matter inside it, what do we mean when we speak of the universe "when it was smaller"?
Alas, this is not the book.
MP3 misleading August 11, 2010
James P. Pfiffner
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I ordered this audio book on CD.
When I received it, I found out that it had to be converted to MP3 format, unlike most audio CDs I purchased in the past. I was able to do this.
But this should be made clear and obvious. Some people who like to listen to audio books do not have the capacity to listen to them in MP3 or convert them to MP3 format.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 45
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