Everyone understands that time moves ahead, not backward, and that you can’t unscramble an egg. One of today’s most promising young physicists has turned a basic fact of breakfast into a gateway to comprehending the Big Bang, the universe, and other galaxies, as well as the origin of the universe. In his book From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll contends that the arrow of time, which points steadfastly from the past to the future, owes its existence to conditions that existed before the Big Bang itself—a period of modern cosmology which Einstein could only have dreamed at the time. However, scientists are increasingly venturing into realms that make Einstein’s theory of relativity appear as if it were child’s play. It is elegant and set out in the same easy-to-understand language that has made Carroll’s collective blog, Cosmic Variance, the most popular physics blog on the Internet.
From Eternity to Here explores the relationship between the features of spacetime before the Big Bang and the flow of time we experience in our everyday lives, drawing on ideas at the leading edge of theoretical physics. Carroll proposes that we exist in a baby universe, a member of a big family of universes and that we are the only ones here. Our siblings have reported seeing an arrow of time moving oppositely from their own. A Brief History of Time is an ambitious and interesting portrayal of the cosmos on an extremely wide scale. It will attract fans of popular physics blockbusters such as Elegant Universe and A Brief History of Time.
