From Eternity to Here : The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

by Carroll, Sean

• ISBN13: 9780452296541
• ISBN10: 0452296544
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-10-26
• Publisher: Plume

Summary

"An accessible and engaging exploration of the mysteries of time." -Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Twenty years ago, Stephen Hawking tried to explain time by understanding the Big Bang. Now, Sean Carroll says we need to be more ambitious. One of the leading theoretical physicists of his generation, Carroll delivers a dazzling and paradigm-shifting theory of time's arrow that embraces subjects from entropy to quantum mechanics to time travel to information theory and the meaning of life. From Eternity to Hereis no less than the next step toward understanding how we came to exist, and a fantastically approachable read that will appeal to a broad audience of armchair physicists, and anyone who ponders the nature of our world.

Author Biography

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech who has won fellowships from the Sloan and Packard foundations, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, writer Jennifer Ouellette.

Table of Contents

Prologue	p. 1
Time, Experience, and the Universe
The Past Is Present Memory	p. 9
The Heavy Hand of Entropy	p. 26
The Beginning and End of Time	p. 44
Time in Einstein's Universe
Time Is Personal	p. 67
Time Is Flexible	p. 82
Looping Through Time	p. 93
Entropy and Time's Arrow
Running Time Backward	p. 119
Entropy and Disorder	p. 143
Information and Life	p. 179
Recurrent Nightmares	p. 202
Quantum Time	p. 228
From the Kitchen to the Multiverse
Black Holes: The Ends of Time	p. 259
The Life of the Universe	p. 287
Inflation and the Multiverse	p. 315
The Past Through Tomorrow	p. 339
Epilogue	p. 366
Appendix: Math	p. 377
Notes	p. 385
Bibliography	p. 411
Acknowledgments	p. 421
Index	p. 423
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