And here you thought the holidays were over. Silly you. Today is the greatest holiday of all: Book Release Day!
That’s right — From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time is out today. That means you could head over to Amazon.com and buy the book right now:
Don’t worry, we’ll wait. Of course you could also buy it later, but there are benefits to having a great first day, and we’re aiming to get as many Amazon purchases as we can. So you might want to take Lee Billings’s advice:
Just drafted a micro-review of @seanmcarroll’s “From Eternity to Here”. It’s really quite good–I suggest you all buy several copies.
I’m excited, anyway. You can find various goodies on the web page, including a reprint of the prologue, an annotated table of contents, a list of upcoming events, links to blurbs and reviews and other commentary, and a collection of related articles. Heck, I even went out and made a video:
I don’t think Spielberg is checking his rear-view mirror, but my budget was a bit lower.
Looking back through my old emails, I was first talking seriously about writing a book on the arrow of time in August, 2006. The contract with Dutton was agreed upon in May, 2007. Worked on it on and off, and finally started working in earnest in mid/late-2008. I emailed the manuscript to the publisher at 2:42 a.m. on Friday, May 8, 2009. And now it’s released to the world.
Writing the book was actually a lot of fun. If you write a very long blog post or medium-length magazine article, you’re talking 3,000 words. This book is 180,000 words, including footnotes. Room to stretch a bit and explain things the right way! Part of the fun was learning new things — I dug into the history a bit, reading papers by Boltzmann and his contemporaries, and also looked into interesting topics like complexity and information theory. But perhaps even more enjoyable was the challenge of explaining really deep ideas in an understandable way. I have a whole chapter that tries to work through the ideas of determinism and reversibility from the ground up — something that most physics books just zoom right past. There are a lot of places where I really took care to explain something basic in a fresh and accessible way — or tried to, anyway. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, so we’ll see what people think.
One thing I learned is that producing a book is very much a collaborative effort. I owe a lot to Stephen Morrow, Tala Oszkay, Katinka Matson, and John Brockman, who provided invaluable guidance and steered me in the right direction more than once. Jason Torchinsky contributed the charming illustrations. And of course to my wife Jennifer, for many reasons, but it doesn’t hurt to have an expert writer and editor right there in the house when you embark on a project like this. Many people were gracious enough to read through the book and point out where it could be improved — with embarrassing accuracy, I may add. (Special thanks to Scott Aaronson and George Musser, for their detailed and substantive critiques.) And I was fortunate enough get a dream team of physicist-writers to provide blurbs for the back of the book: Lisa Randall, Brian Greene, Kip Thorne, and Roger Penrose. I won’t reproduce them all here (that’s what the web page is for), but here’s Penrose:
Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here provides a wonderfully accessible account of some of the most profound mysteries of modern physics. While you may not agree with all his conclusions, you will find the discussion fascinating, and taken to much deeper levels than is normal in a work of popular science.
Of course everyone will agree with all my conclusions … eventually.
Enough of the folderol of writing and publishing the damn book — time to talk about the science! Next week I’ll post the schedule for a weekly book club right here at Cosmic Variance; the discussions will officially begin on January 19, and will continue every subsequent Tuesday. I’m going to try to participate as much as I can in the discussions — I want to hear how people react to the book, but I’m also expecting to learn a lot. Time and the origin of the universe — pretty big subjects, always room to understand more.
MESSAGE..Sean, congrats book about time, pls send signed copy to the above responder fan(who’s finances are insufficiently balanced after LHC caused black_hole money loss paradox dated april 2010..eh..2012..and a time deflected date post magnetic fault?)..our future needs charity..time waits for your reply 😉
end MESSAGE.
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Congratulations!!! When are you going on the Colbert Report?
Congrats! Just ordered a copy. Not via Amazon but from our local book store in south germany though – hope that counts too..
Congrats!
Of course I’ll have to wait now until NEXT Christmas before I can have it!
Thanks to some relativistic effect the book arrived here in Sweden on New Years Eve. I have read it. Absolutely excellent.
Wonderful! Meanwhile I’ll be busy shoveling snow from the post-office to my house.
Best Wishes Sean,
I’ve ordered my copy. I like the title and your remark “From Eternity to Here- is HERE!…quite profound; would not suggest anyone start reading the book without first pondering the implications of the title- and the meaning of eternity itself. I liked the coffee illustration. It was interesting to watch the coffee “un-mix” seemingly as easily as it was mixed…entropy direction is related to the set of coordinates from which it is observed…the (critical) link between the past, present- and future….
Apparently you’re one of the hottest young physicists coming up in the physicists ranks, so says Barnes and Noble.
…I feel cold, and more than a little frightened.
But in all seriousness, good show mr. Carroll! Good Show!
Got my copy last night — it looks great, and I can’t wait to read it this weekend. Congratulations, Sean!
Congratulations!! How does it feel post-partum? I’m really looking forward to reading it.
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Amusingly, the price trend on Amazon has the arrow of time reversed. Which is to say that “11 new from $17.49, 2 used from $28.40” 🙂
Congratulations Sean! We’ll get our copy and dive in. It’ll be required reading for the lab (esp the part on biological physics). Already got a heads up from amazon.de….
Reviewed in the WSJ! A nice one. Another journal conquered.
A cool idea from GFR Ellis- T Rothman on ArXiv “…the arrow of time arises simply because
the future does not yet exist.”
Yay my copy has arrived!! Can’t wait to read it 🙂
Having just seen Brian Cox’ book on Plait’s blog (yeah, I’m catching up), I have to ask a very important question about this new book:
Does it have cats?
Yes, there is a cat. Also a dog, but the cat gets top billing.
Thanks mainly to Sean and Cosmic Variance, I have been struggling through “Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms” for the past month or so, and now have a very good excuse to put it down and read something that I’m sure is far more accessible and better written. Looking rearward to it….!
I will check it out. I always did like Kerr Deborah…
My copy is in the mail! Alas, I had a Barnes & Noble gift card, so didn’t use Amazon. Same price, though…
Hi Sean, An impressive book. Not finished yet (I’ll take my time and digest each idea carefully) but I really appreciate your objectivity, and the way you carefully follow the history of science in your writing….One quick question/: PP 211, near the bottom….”We could consider a slight variation on this approach, in which there were only a finite number of particles in the universe (very sound- finite mass- and relates to our finding the unverse evolving in the manner in which it is), but they had an infinite amount of space in which to evolve. Then recurrences would truly be absent.”
(I agree). My question is: In a universe in which the existence of particles and mass itself are finite and inter-related with the shape of space-time, is it tenable to conjecture that space is infinite? Of course, other models hold that time is infinite (eternal), so why not space? Are time and space part of the same thing…or is time distict in some essential way, from space? There is a lot of tricky geometry here! Can “closed” space actually have an infinite quality, for example, or does space “have” to be “open” to be infinite?
A fine, thought provoking book! Best Wishes….
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Your book just arrived today & I’ve started it. Looks fascinating. Also, I took your advice about going to the Math & Physics Forum for my questions & discovered that Moving Dimension Theory IS a crackpot theory & can be safely ignored. Glad to get THAT settled! Therefore, I can ignore that terrible review of your book on Amazon.com. (And also the other bad one by that failed Czech physicist.)