From Eternity to Here is the best available single-book popular treatment of time and entropy as understood by present-day physics. These are not easy topics. The history of the philosophy of time is byzantine, burdened with both wishful thinking and self-absorbed pessimism; and if there’s one modern topic that’s been thoroughly obfuscated by misuse (by both scientists and lay people), it’s entropy. Carroll, as usual writing to be understood, cuts through it all. He has personal views on these topics, but to his credit those views, while fascinating and convincing, are relegated to the final part of the book. The majority of the text lays out the questions clearly, and that alone is an immense contribution. Understanding the nature of spacetime— defining spacetime—seems to be the key to answering the biggest questions in physics: the low-entropy boundary condition at the origin of the universe, the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics, the fine tuning of universal constants, the nature of dark energy…the list goes on. Spacetime and gravity are not what we think they are. We need new ideas, and Carroll’s book, working through the next few generations of minds, is a gift to the cause. 9
Carroll, Sean. From Eternity to Here. Dutton, 2010. Reviewed Sep 13, 2024.