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How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek Award-winning journalist Stephen Petranek says humans will live on Mars by 2027. Learn more | See related books
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The arrow of time is a central issue in fundamental physics, and one that remains an open question even in the age of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It is a tall task even to define the question properly, never mind to explain what some of the proposed resolutions are. Nevertheless, Carroll is one of the best writers of popular science working today, and in this book he tackles the topic beautifully, guiding the reader through the relevant ideas, many of which we all think we have an intuitive feel for, like entropy, and explaining their physical meanings, and how gravity complicates the story.
The book is worth reading for its expert descriptions of the background material alone, but the reader hungry for speculations of how physics at the frontier may provide an understanding of the arrow of time will not be disappointed. Carroll devotes ample space to the concepts of cosmic inflation, the role of quantum mechanics, baby universes, and the setting that string theory may provide for all of this. None of this is settled ground in physics yet, and the author makes that entirely clear. But it hard to read this account and not come away with a tangible sense of the excitement to be found in taking on these most fundamental of problems.
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55 of 59 people found the following review helpful
This is a wonderful book that would merit a second reading to understand it more fully. At a fundamental level physics consists of the Standard Model, General Relativity and the Big Bang Inflationary Model of the universe. However, in this model there is something unexplained and it is the Past Hypothesis, that is that the universe started in a low entropy configuration. However the author speculates that perhaps the Big Bang was neither the beginning of time nor a moment of low entropy, but a moment of lowest entropy and the entropy increases in both directions of time, towards the future of the Big Bang and towards its past (from our point of view). This would be the situation in a single connected universe, although string theory predicts a multiverse.
Trying to elucidate the meaning of time (perhaps "an emergent phenomenon rather than a necessary part of our ultimate description of the world") the author reviews special and general relativity, Boltzmann's entropy, black holes and the controversy about conservation of information, life, quantum mechanics, inflation and the multiverse. Generally speaking the book is written in an accessible style (eggs can be broken and turned into omelettes, but not the other way around to describe the Second Law), but you will need to reread some parts to make the most of it.
In the final chapter Sean Carroll faces the "search for meaning in a preposterous universe". I quote: "We find ourselves, not as a central player in the life of the cosmos, but as a tiny epiphenomenon, flourishing for a brief moment as we ride a wave of increasing entropy...Purpose and meaning are not to be found in the laws of nature, or in the plans of any external agent...it is our job to create them.Read more ›
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101 of 116 people found the following review helpful
I am not a physicist. I majored in English in college. I shouldn't be able to understand this book on any level. But I do. And it's fascinating. Illuminating. And just plain interesting as hell. That's Sean Carroll's greatest achievement in this page-turner about the TIME we live in. If you have any interest at all in getting your head around just what this elusive "time" we all experience is all about, you should read this book.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Roughly the first 3/4 of the book is quite standard physics, and a few related fields, e.g. information theory. The last few chapters, where the author, Sean Carroll, suggests a possible answer to the puzzle, are much more speculative, something he makes very clear.
To me the book was quite interesting. A few equations are displayed, but there is no actual use of mathematics. I have an M.S. in Applied Physics, so I cannot really say how a reader with no technical background would cope with it. Carroll goes through a lot of material, and the sheer quantity of it might be overwhelming. Unfortunately, that is just the way things are. Nobody is going to cope with this without the willingness to do some hard thinking. Carroll does include a lot of pop culture references that readers can relate to, although one of those may not be in any future edition of the book.
A couple interesting (to me) notes:
The complexity of the universe is different from the entropy. Just after the Big Bang the universe was very simple--the same high energy subatomic soup every where. Right now the universe is very complicated: There are lots of galaxies, stars, planets, black holes, people, etc. However, the entropy of the universe has increased: The formation of all those objects is mostly due to gravitation, as matter coalesces together. This gravitational process increases the total entropy, more than offsetting the order in all the structure. Eventually all of this structure will fade away. Even black holes will decay by the Hawking process, leaving a very thin, cold, dark, and simple universe. So while the universe started in a simple state, evolved into a complex state, and will eventually decay into another simple state, the entropy is always increasing. See pages 199-201.Read more ›
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This item: From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
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