From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time »

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech who has won fellowships from the Sloan and Packard foundations, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, writer Jennifer Ouellette.

"An accessible and engaging exploration of the mysteries of time."
-Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe

Twenty years ago, Stephen Hawking tried to explain time by understanding the Big Bang. Now, Sean Carroll says we need to be more ambitious. One of the leading theoretical physicists of his generation, Carroll delivers a dazzling and paradigm-shifting theory of time's arrow that embraces subjects from entropy to quantum mechanics to time travel to information theory and the meaning of life.

From Eternity to Here is no less than the next step toward understanding how we came to exist, and a fantastically approachable read that will appeal to a broad audience of armchair physicists, and anyone who ponders the nature of our world.

The Washington Post - Justin Moyer

Sean Carroll…does his best to make the arcane accessible…Though he exiles much of the math to an appendix, Carroll keeps it real, getting at the complex guts of cutting-edge cosmology

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