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.

Prologue The nature of time, the importance of entropy, and the role of cosmology 1

Pt. 1 Time, Experience, and the Universe

1 The Past Is Present Memory 9

2 The Heavy Hand of Entropy 26

3 The Beginning and End of Time 44

Pt. 2 Time In Einstein's Universe

4 Time Is Personal 67

5 Time Is Flexible 82

6 Looping Through Time 93

Pt. 3 Entropy and Time's Arrow

7 Running Time Backward 119

8 Entropy and Disorder 143

9 Information and Life 179

10 Recurrent Nightmares 202

11 Quantum Time 228

Pt. 4 From the Kitchen to the Multiverse

12 Black Holes: The Ends of Time 259

13 The life of the Universe 287

14 Inflation and the Multiverse 315

15 The Past Through Tomorrow 339

16 Epilogue 366

Appendix Math 377

Notes 385

Bibliography 411

Acknowledgments 421

Index 423