From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
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- ISBN13: 9780525951339
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A rising star in theoretical physics offers his awesome vision of our universe and beyond, all beginning with a simple question: Why does time go forwards?
Time moves forwards, 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 Huge Bang, the universe, and additional 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 being to conditions before the Huge 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 simple-to- know language that has made his group blog, Cosmic Variance, the most well loved physics blog on the Net.
From Eternity to Here uses thoughts at the cutting edge of theoretical physics to explore how properties of spacetime before the Huge Bang can clarify the flow of time we experience in our everyday lives. Carroll suggests that we live in a baby universe, part of a large family tree 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 well loved physics blockbusters like Elegant Universe and A Brief History of Time.
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On page 87 Professor Sean Carroll writes, “The adage goes that every equation cuts your book sales in half.” Had only Newton and Einstein known this! Reflect of how many more copies of Principia Newton would have sold! Reflect of how many more copies of The Meaning of Relativity would have sold! Lacking so many equations, Einstein and Newton could have popularized science, as a replacement for of just making it.
The amusing, ironic thing about this philosophy “The adage goes that every equation cuts your book sales in half” is that it is the central tenet of String Theory and LQG. Lacking any testable equations, the theories can stay forever in their infancy (lacking time machines and wormholes even), feeding thousands with tenure and book deals, and fosteirng the growth of snarky psudoscience cabals, perfect with armies of pre-reviewers living in parallel universes, equipped with time machines that allow them to get advanced copies of the book for five-star reviews. I have heard that they are now offering classes in certain grad schools which teach the art and science of the anonymous ad hominem attack, and the back-handed snark, to be used in the defense of postulateless, equationless, handwaving pseudosicence. Tens of millions of dollars are at stake, and if we all add one-additional to our blog rolls and post anonymous comments on others’, we can win huge and profit in this new era of scienceless, equationless science, which hath also exiled the founding fathers of physics upon whose shoulders science stands! It as if once they ascended in the college, they had to kick the ladders of logic, turth, beauty, and reason on down; and the casualties include the heroic spirits of Einstein, Galileo, and Newton.
Dr. Carroll’s book is reasonably remarkable in all that it leaves out in its massive part. Dr. Carroll provides plenty of pop-culture quotes but when it comes to defining science, Dr. Carroll forgets to quote the Greats, as he and his colleagues attempt to redefine science in tehir own image–as that which serves not the privileged ideals, but the bottom line and book sales. Moving Dimensions Theory–which regards time as an emergent phenomena–was inspired in part by Einstein’s words pertaining to the privileged purpose of physical theories: “Before I enter upon a critique of mechanics as a foundation of physics, something of a broadly all-purpose scenery will first have to be said concerning the points of view according to which it is possible to criticize physical theories at all. The first point of view is obvious: The theory must not contradict empirical facts. . . The second point of view is not concerned with the relation to the material of observation but with the premises of the theory itself, with what may briefly but abstractedly be characterized as the “sincerity” or “logical simplicity” of the premises (of the basic concepts and of the relations between these which are taken as a basis). This point of view, an exact formulation of which meets with fantastic difficulties, has played an vital role in the selection and evaluation of theories since time immemorial.”
Einstein writes, “The theory must not contradict empirical facts,” and straight away we can rid ourselves of the ridiculous notion of time travel into the past and multiverses, as a replacement for of ridding ourselves of Einstein, as Dr. Carroll does.
“In questions of science, the power of thousands is not worth the humble reasoning of one individual,” but in the era of the blogosphere, humble reasoning is not worth the power of the snarky pseudosicence alliance which drives book sales.
Galileo goes on to characterize the entire lost generation of handwaving “physicists” who have dominated and debauched the meadow over the past several decades; replacing exalted, simple postulates, equations, and experiments with snark, blogrolls, ad hominemn attacks, and crackpot indexes so as to again tenure and dollars. Galileo describes the science-free multiverse Inquisition with, “…my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first set up some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such opinion in support of their fixed thought … gain their instant acceptance … whatever is brought forwards against it, but ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage … Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries…. No excellent can come of dealing with such people . . . their company may be not only unpleasant but treacherous. -Galileo”
Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition which placed Galileo under house arrest, who was saved from Bruno’s fate only after he stated that he believed the planet was indeed stationary. Heroic men battled on the front lines of truth and even gave that last full measure of devotion so that scientific truth might be free from religious corruption, and today Dr. Carroll et al. are thanking them by building sure that science is free from science–free from simple, exalted equations, postulates, logic, reason, and empirical tests and observations.
One of the more amusing phenomena that has emerged over the past decade is the Ph.D.-less physics fanboy, employed and encouraged by the “Huge Physics” bloggers to tear down and attack persons who question the equationless, postulateless non-theories and anti-theories set into the world by the physics-free “Huge Physics” bloggers. The sycophantic fanboys see this as their best chance to eventually gain tenure in the new system that has exiled empirical reality and replaced it handwaving, snark, and intimidation. The Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek wrote, “When truth ends, the worst rise to the top,” and as a social conduct experiment, science-free String Theory has exalted books such as From Eterinity to Here.
One of the sadder aspects of this decades-ancient regime of failure and untestable pseudosicence is that is has bred a snarky, self-satisfied, unheroic type and agreed him the office once held by men of fantastic honor and integrity. This decline and dishonesty has been witnessed all across our society and civilization, and physics has been no exception. One thing missing from Carroll’s book is the joy of science and truth one sees in all of Feynman’s, Einstein’s, Bohr’s, and Wheeler’s sentences–in every one of their words. For Twain reminds us, “one cannot pray a lie,” and it’s just no fun replacing exalted science with mere speculation for pure profit, and encouraging all of one’s friends and sycophantic fanboys/fangirls to pre-review the book and post here to drive sales.
On page 3 Carroll writes, “The arrow of time connects the early universe to something we experience factually every moment of our lives. It’s not just breaking eggs, or additional irreversible processes like mixing milk into coffee or how an untended room tends to get messier over time. The arrow of time is the reason why time seems to flow around us, or why,m if you prefer, we seem to go through time. It’s why we remember teh past, but not the future. It’s why we evolve and metabolize and eventually die. It’s why we judge in cause and effect, and it’s crucial to our notions of free will.”
And then, Carroll adds, “And it’s all because of the huge bang.”
The next 400 pages repeat over and over, “Because I said so.”
But as both Peter Woit and Lubos Motl point out, in the following 400+ pages of his mammoth book, nowhere does he scientifically prove nor support his contention. While Carroll fails in unifying time and all its arrows and asymmetries with the huge bang, he does make it at a far more hard unification of hitherto disparate forces of nture, as he unifies Peter Woit and Lubos Motl! Perhaps he should recieve the Nobel for this!
The *physical* reality underlying time and all its arrows and asymmetries, as well as the huge bang, is Moving Dimensions Theory’s central postualte that the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at c, or dx4/dt=ic. Because MDT comes with a postualte and equation from which all of Einstein’s relativity naturally emerges, as well as quantum entanglement & nonlocality, and entropy, the phd-less physics fanboys are commanded to rail against it and snark it from behind anonymous masks, as they have been educated as to the new Carrollian reality wherein physics must remain free of postualtes, equations, and science. I am not kididng you. If you do not judge me, post a comment, and I will share a link or two with you.
You can see how Sean ignores all the Nobel Laureates’ opinions regarding String Theory in the comments here: fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/318 , and in his book, Sean still refuses to acknowledge the exalted spirit of Feyman, Einstein, Laughlin, and Glashow; as a replacement for siding with Michio Kaku. For what does it profit a multiverser to listen to Nobel Laureates and loseth his book deals and language engagements?
Long ago, Einstein laid the multiverse to rest with, “But before mankind could be ripe for a science which takes in the whole of reality, a second fundamental truth was needed, which only became common property among philosophers with the advent of Kepler and Galileo. Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts form experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics — indeed, of modern science altogether.” –Albert Einstein, Thoughts and Opinions
Why sean exiles Galileo and Einstein is a mystery, until one considers the fact that it has been the only way to advance in theoretical physics ove the past thirty years.
Math can be very pretty, but Einstein reminds us that physicists ought pursue *physics,* founded in a physical reality–”Mathematics are well and excellent but scenery keeps dragging us around by the nose.”
And because the multiverse/sci-fi-pseudo-science kept popping up, Einstein laid it all to rest with, “It is anomalous to replace the four-dimensional continuum by a five-dimensional one and then subsequently to tie up artificially one of persons five dimensions in order to account for the fact that it does not manifest itself.” -Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest. Just reflect what Einstein would have said about entire parallel universes/muliverses/landscapes we cannot see!
No marvel Carroll et al. hath exiled Einstein! For his simple majesty gets in teh way of their hundreds, upon hunders of pages of snarky insider handwaving, bolstered by pseudoscience blogrolls and twitter accounts.
With an heroic spirit, MDT takes us back to origin of modern physics–to the original papers on relativity and QM, and it humbles itself upon that mountaintop. And when it comes on down, off the shoulders of relativity and QM’s giants, MDT presents us with a fundamental view of reality that conforms to all experimental evidence, while not only resolving the paradoxes of the non-locality of the EPR effect and seemingly frozen time in Godel’s block universe, but also unifying the resolution of both physical curiosities within a simple physical postulate–the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions, or dx4/dt = ic. In a sense, this is the first theory to predict QM’s nonlocality and entanglement, by postulating that the fourth dimension is inherently nonlocal via its expansion–an empirical fact that the timeless, ageless, nonlocal photon agrees with, as the photon surfs the fourth expanding dimension. And not only does MDT predict this, but it also provides a *physical* model for entropy and time and all its arrows and assymetries throughout all realms. And finally, all of relativity may be derived from MDT’s simple postulate, as it is in my paper–the fourth dimension is expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions–dx4/dt = ic. A postulate and an equation representing a novel *physical* feature of our universe–a fourth expanding dimension–and the natural, subsequent prediction of all of relativity, qm’s nonlocality, entropy, time’s arrows and assymetries in all realms, and quantum entanglement.
“I don’t judge in mathematics.” Quoted in Carl Seelig. Albert Einstein.
“Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I assure you that mine are greater.” –Einstein
“Geometry is not right, it is advantageous.” –Jules H. Poincare
MDT provides both the “elementary foundations” of relativity that Einstein yet sought, and the foundational physical reality underlying and causing quantum nonlocality and entanglement, which Schrodinger labeled the “characteristic trait” of QM. Einstein’s Principle of Relativity, as well as his two postulates, derive from MDT’s simple physical model and single postulate and equation which is more concise and has the added benefits of providing for free will, liberating us from the block universe, weaving change into the fundamental fabric of space-time for the first time in the history of relativity, and providing an elementary, foundational physical model for time and all its arrows and asymmetries, entropy, and QM’s nonlocality and entanglement, as well as reality’s probabilistic scenery. The fourth dimension is inherently nonlocal via its invariant expansion, which is the source of nonlocality as well as relativity. All of this is more fully developed in Dr. E’s 2008 paper on MDT which examines Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on Relativity and derives the Einsteinian/Minkowskian formulation of relativity from MDT’s dx4/dt=ic: Time as an Emergent Phenomenon: Traveling Back to the Heroic Age of Physics: fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/238 & fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/432.
Simple, logical proofs of MDT:
MDT PROOF#1: Relativity tells us that a timeless, ageless photon remains in one place in the fourth dimension. Quantum mechanics tells us that a photon propagates as a spherically-symmetric expanding wavefront at the velocity of c. Ergo, the fourth dimension must be expanding relative to the three spatial dimensions at the rate of c, in a spherically-symmetric manner. The expansion of the fourth dimension is the source of nonlocality, entanglement, time and all its arrows and asymmetries, c, relativity, entropy, free will, and all motion, change, and measurement, for no measurement can be made lacking change. For the first time in the history of relativity, change has been wedded to the fundamental fabric of spacetime in MDT.
MDT PROOF#2: Einstein (1912 Man. on Rel.) and Minkowski wrote x4=ict. Ergo dx4/dt=ic.
MDT PROOF#3: The only way to stay stationary in the three spatial dimensions is to go at c through the fourth dimension. The only way to stay stationary in the fourth dimension is to go at c through the three spatial dimensions. Ergo the fourth dimension is moving at c relative to the three spatial dimensions.
MDT twitter proof (limited to 140 characters): SR: photon is stationary in 4th dimension. QM: photon is probability wave expanding @ c. Ergo: 4th dimension expands @ c & MDT: dx4/dt=ic -from http://twitter.com/45surf
–fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/511
When history is written, Carroll et al. will have done very small to “popularize” physics, which has ever been best popularized by persons heroic souls who brought into the world simple, brilliant equations and concepts that are far simpler to know than Carroll’s handwaving, oft inscrutable neither-here-nor-there text, which will further serve to exile right physicists from the college, while attracting and exalting legions of sycophantic fanboys, ready to rage for Sean et al. throughout the blogosphere, so as to keep science free from physical postulates, logic, reason, equations, and empirical reality from here to eternity, so as to further the mere profiteer’s regime.
Thank goodness their era of physicsnark is coming to an end, replaced by epic, exalted simplicity and beauty represented in simple, timeless postulates and equations underlying time and all its arrows and asymmetries, while also providing a common, deeper, hitherto unheralded *physical* foundation underlying all of relativity, quantum mechanics, and entropy: dx4/dt=ic
So let’s bring it on back. Let’s delight in the “Fom Eternity to Here” pseudoscience, but let’s also bring on back that heroic, exalted spirit which has ever advanced all epic science, art, and philosophy!
MDT delivers an essential theory underlying Huygens’ Principle which Feynman’s many-paths formulation of QM also exalts, whereas Loop Quantum Gravity and String Theory only sustain a myth of an essential theory and thus perpetual funding. Nobel Laureates have referred to this present era as the dark ages of physics, where progress in physics is frozen in a block universe tied together with tiny, vibrating strings and small loops which nobody has ever physically seen, violating the fundamental maxim of science place into the world by Galileo, Einstein, et. al. Feynman echoes the words of the heroic Achilles (whom Socrates referenced while defending philosophy as a virtuous pursuit in the Apology ) in defining science as an honest, honorable pursuit: “As I detest the doorways of death, so too do I detest that man who speaks into the world one thing while hiding in his heart another.” (Achilles in Homer’s Iliad )
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself–and you are the simplest person to fool. … You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that. . . I want to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of judge, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. . . I’m talking about a point, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe incorrect, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to additional scientists, and I reflect to laymen. . . If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should clarify to the layman what you’re doing–and if they don’t want to support you under persons circumstances, then that’s their choice. -Feynman, Cargo Cult Science
To me there has never been a privileged source of worldly honor or honor than that connected with advances in science. -Newton
Errors are not in the art but in the artificers. -Newton
Yes! Physics is yet reasonably intact!
All the best in 2010–from here to eternity!
Dr. E
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I establish the style of the book hard to deal with. It’s overwritten, with a lot of silly examples thrown into the mix that just confuses the tale and delays the reader from the points the leader is trying to make. So it’s not an elegant discussion we have here. It’s the feeling you get when a name takes way too long to tell a joke, embellishing to the point of frustration. I would advise reading part of this before jumping in with a buy, maybe you’ll like it. Wished I had, what a waste and disappointment.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I’m not a physicist or a cosmologist. I bought this book not so much to know the science of time but to integrate new scientific theory and fact into my understanding of reality. Since Fritjof Capra’s The Tao Of Physics first helped me know the tie between the “new” science and my spiritual path twenty some years ago, I have looked to progressive scientists to take their place as essential teachers in my struggle to know and grow.
Sean Carroll’s From Eternity To Here has been an enlightening experience. Mr. Carroll writes with clarity, focus, and yes, even humor about the scenery of time. Never slipping into “science-speak”, never language down to persons of us who establish advanced science and math classes way beyond dull, he makes accessible understanding of the new theories and customary facts about time, relativity, and the scenery of our universe.
Limitations? Well, yes. As is the case with nearly all scientific writing, one quickly gets the feeling that the perspective of what we are reading is of a name “on the inside looking at the inside.” There is an inevitable feeling of profound examination of the universal belly-button.
Our scientific focus has yet to come to grips with the need to widen scientific horizons, to hear and heed the clarion call of spiritual teachers through the ages to open to the experience of transcendence and then task conscious mind to examine, weigh and measure, and then – finally – to “know” the scenery of our being.
Buy the book. It’s fantastic. The new science is wonderful and elegant. And if you listen closely you’ll hear God’s voice gently calling to Mr. Carroll, “Over here… over here…”
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This book is a bit headache inducing, since it informs you of what you may already be aware of but then you step out of the box into the much larger picture of possibilities and more thoughts of what truth may lay beyond our everyday experiences about time. It is written to be understood by the layman as many practical examples are agreed with many fantastic illustrations to help make the thoughts more concrete. At the time of this review, I’m only about a quarter into the book but am looking forwards to reading the rest.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
In this book, Sean Carroll aims to connect the most mundane phenomena from the everyday life such as the scrambling of eggs to the most speculative concepts in cosmology such as bubble universes where time runs backwards. Of course, science has shown that no such relationship exists – even though it may be attractive for some really ambitious armchair physicists – so Carroll fails. But it may be appealing to look at this failure in some detail.
To make the book “cooler”, Carroll has used various random characters such as Miss Fund, a cat who hides under its sofa, and Brad Pitt who grows younger with time (as F. Scott Fitzgerald told him to do in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”). The storylines were largely absent and they didn’t help to shed light on the highly controversial scientific points, either. The same seems to be right for several quotes – such as persons from St. Augustine. I suspect that the leader only wanted to superficially “connect” with the lay readers and broader audiences. After all, the same thing can be said about the title which is a mutation of the title of a legendary novel by James Jones.
Carroll occasionally writes some things about physics of time that are right. At any rate, the main scientific goal of the book is to argue that the irreversibility of the phenomena around us (e.g. that we get older and never younger) is a consequence of some details in the history of our Universe. We must live in a bubble Universe surrounded by additional bubbles where time runs backwards and where many additional logically inconsistent phenomena take place.
Carroll never shows why he thinks that the asymmetric scrambling of an egg is linked to any of persons crazy speculations about our cosmic pedigree. In fact, we can’t blame him for his failure. Nothing like that can be clarified because no relation of this sort exists. Even for a excellent writer, it would be hard to demonstrate something that is so fundamentally untrue.
The irreversibility of time is related to the so-called second law of thermodynamics – to the increasing amount of disorder of any isolated physical object (increasing entropy). And this law can be proven and has been proven more than 100 years ago. The entropy of objects is related to the statistical properties of a large number of atoms (inside the same egg – the rest of the Universe and its history is beside the point, because of the “locality” of the laws of Scenery). Undergraduate students have been correctly learning that thermodynamics (yucky observations about the heat, temperature, and irreversibility) may be derived from statistical physics (mathematics applied to many atoms) for a century. Sorry to say, Sean Carroll didn’t listen to his teachers because he rumor has it that thinks that thermodynamics is a consequence of some details in cosmology. He has missed the main point of statistical physics.
There is nothing unnatural (or even contradictory) about the low value of entropy in the past. Reasonably on the contrary, it is a consequence of the second law that guarantees that the entropy increases. We know that the entropy used to be lower and we know that it agrees with all additional laws of physics that have been empirically validated.
The proof of the increasing entropy due to Ludwig Boltzmann (who later committed suicide, being surrounded by people not unsimilar to Carroll himself who were unable to appreciate the depth and validity of his key insights into thermodynamics) also uses a pre-existing logical arrow of time but there is nothing incorrect about it. The logical arrow of time – adage that we may remember the past and not the future – belongs to the logic of any conceivable world with “time” that qualitatively resembles ours. No world with “observers” can exist lacking it.
While the microscopic, exact laws of physics may be time-reversal symmetric (they don’t distinguish the past and the future) or at least CPT-symmetric (snub the acronym if you don’t know what it means), the logic how we apply them in the presence of unknown data permanently “discriminates” the past from the future. For example, if you calculate the probability that a particle decays into a pair of particles and you don’t specify the spins, you must sum the probability over the final spins (because you don’t “care” about them) but you must average over the initial spins (because you don’t “know” them).
Summing is something different than averaging – and the past therefore differs from the future. And this asymmetry – an extra denominator preferring a larger number of states in the future than in the past – automatically implies that the entropy increases. The role of “assumptions” and their “consequences” in logic is asymmetric. And in the same way, whenever there is any incomplete information, the past and the future play an asymmetric role, too – because by the very definition of the words, the past is described by the “assumptions” and the future is about their “consequences”. Because there’s no symmetry between the assumptions and their consequences, it’s also impossible to mix the two arrows of time inside a larger multiverse.
Also, in a arresting contrast with Carroll’s text, the methods to retrodict the past are completely different than the methods to predict the future. To predict the future is “straightforward” – quantum mechanics tells us the probabilities. But, to reconstruct the past, we must choose competing hypotheses, assign them with (to some extent arbitrary) priors, and do the logical inference. The answer – our retrodiction – is not unique. But when we do it correctly, we may see that the entropy in the past was lower than today.
Most of the mysterious properties of the bubble Universes discussed by Carroll are even more impossible than the ordinary “time machines” and “wormholes” from some conventional well loved books. If there exists a contest looking for a professional physicist who prints and sells a book promoting the most scientifically nonsensical phenomena and relationships between them, Carroll is a new hot candidate.
The science in the book makes no sense and the purpose of the book is for the leader to show how he can make science well loved. Except that it isn’t science and I guess that it won’t get too well loved, either, because the references to the well loved culture are excessively cheap, chaotic, and out-of-touch even for highly undemanding readers. Finally, let me say that you should largely snub the unhelpful votes under the unfavorable reviews because the leader uses his blog to distort the public perception of this very weird book.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5