Reddit reviews From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
We found 18 Reddit comments about From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Not OP, just helping out with some formatting (and links!) because I like these suggestions.
> 1) The Magic Of Reality - Richard Dawkins
>
> 2) The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
>
> 3)A Brief History Of Time - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari (Any Book By Daniel Dennet)
>
> 5)Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
>
> 6)From Eternity Till Here - Sean Caroll (Highly Recommended)
>
> 7)The Fabric Of Cosmos - Brian Greene (If you have good mathematical understanding try Road To Reality By Roger Penrose)
>
> 8)Just Six Numbers - Martin Reese (Highly Recommended)
>rigid (biological) materialism
What is rigid about considering life a material phenomenon? We have no indication of any kind of reality other than material.
>what is Time?
That's a physics question. Here is a book by Sean Carroll that covers science's best (and always tentative) models on the subject.
>If you're measuring a pulse or taking an MRI scan, it's pretty silly to conveniently forget that you're sitting on a 4 billion year old rock, dealing with the nuclear dust of stars long passed.
Yes, Carl Sagan pointed out that we are stardust. It's well known, and I don't think anyone has forgotten about it.
>Does "Love" exist?
Yes, as an emotion.
>Does the number "7" exist?
Yes, as an abstraction. The symbol stands for a mathematical quantity. And the Prince song.
>The literal idea of love.
Yes, but love literally exists as an emotion. It has no existence independent of emotions, no more than patriotism or optimism exist independently of the minds of conscious agents.
> We consider love as an eternal idea.
But few mean that literally. Humans have always had love, and probably other animals feel something analogous to love, but life has not always existed here. If you believe that the universe has always existed and that there have always been worlds populated by life complex to have emotions, then possibly you can argue that love is actually eternal. I can't speak on that.
>We say, there is such a thing as "absolute morality."
Which seems to mean just that we're really really sure. We're expressing the intensity of our conviction. Then there are theists, some of whom call their version of what they think God said objective and inerrant. But that's another issue. There is always someone claiming to speak for God.
> but it seems silly to think a "better physics" or "better biology" could in principle shed any light at all on "the nature of the soul" (that is, psyche)
Soul, mind, spirit, seem to be metaphors for consciousness, awareness, mind, whatever. If you think that science has nothing to say about the mind, about cognition, learning, memory, or perception, I would argue that you aren't really trying.
>back then they would have readily acknowledged the reality of angels and gods
Believing in something isn't "acknowledging the reality" of that something. That phrasing begs the question. They also "acknowledged the reality" of gods or spirits causing lightning, disease, earthquakes, etc.
>why are we continually hard-pressed to justify ourselves before the faithful?
What am I justifying, exactly? That I don't see any reason to believe in God? Science is, so far as I can tell, the only way we have of learning about the world out there. Religion and faith were basically failed sciences. When there was a plague, they prayed and built churches. Science actually works. It's not perfect, and will never make us omniscient (so far as I can tell) but the alternative is... what? Believing that Zeus made the lightning? You actually consider that an improvement over science?
The arrow of time problem is a pretty deep one, and it veers into a few weird places at times. I highly recommend Sean Carroll's book From Eternity to Here which gives time a very thorough look, unlike what we could ever do in a reddit comment.
I posted some video ideas earlier but I see that you also asked for any docs recommendations. A good place to read up on what some leading physicists have to say is The Nature of Time contest winning essays and prizes sponsored by the Foundational Questions Instiute (FQXi). There's a wealth of good info in those essays.
If you want to get into it even further, FQXi hosted a conference on Time (again with leading researchers in the field) and they posted the videos and slides from that conference here
If you want a popular-level book recommendation, mine would be From Eternity to Here
Highly recommend Sean Caroll's work on time.
http://www.amazon.com/From-Eternity-Here-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/mysteries-of-modern-physics-time.html
You can find talks on YouTube as well. Google is your friend.
>But we also know at the most fundamental level of quantum mechanics the world works in terms of probabilities that collapse into a single reality.
​
That's the Copenhagen Interpretation, not the Many Worlds Interpretation.
This post from Sean Carroll on Quantum Mechanics (it's ch. 11 in his book From Eternity To Here) is very clarifying and demystifying even though it doesn't answer all your questions.
http://www.amazon.com/From-Eternity-Here-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544 is tough , but really interesting IMO.
You can take it wherever ya want, but take this map!
Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has enough passion for the concept of time that he's earned the nickname "Time Lord" (somewhat jokingly of course). In 2010 he published From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time and often posts on the Discover blog Cosmic Variance.
First article: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/opinion/can-evolution-have-a-higher-purpose.html
There's a link in there to another article that is also good.
Here's a talk given at a Mormon transhumanist conference. It's not really tied to mormonism, especially not this talk.
https://youtu.be/Q4jYlKavkmQ
The guy speaking is a friend of mine, and he describes himself as an agnostic, leaning toward the theist side. His definition of god is very different from the typical definition. It's more like the process of evolution heading towards more complexity and more cooperation, it is possible that there is something directing that. Of course there is no conclusive proof, there really cannot be, but it is still interesting to think about.
I also like a concept called the arrow of time. Here's a fun music video for an intro.
https://youtu.be/i6rVHr6OwjI
Look in the description for a link to the lecture that inspired the music video. The professor is Sean Carroll, and my friend recommends his book, https://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544
I hope that helps!
That's simply a mathematical description of it. We're saying that antimatter moving forwards in time is mathematically identical to matter moving backwards. Matter can be thought of as antimatter moving backwards in time, too.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics (entropy increases) comes from the definition of entropy: high entropy means that there are lots of ways to arrange things microscopically so that they're indistinguishable at our level. That means necessarily that there are more high entropy states than low entropy states, so by pure probability evolving a system in time (in either direction) leads to a higher entropy system. It's got nothing to do with individual particles moving forwards or backwards in time.
Most of what you consider to be consequences of time moving forwards are consequences of entropy increasing: a being moving "backwards" in time isn't going to remember the future, because remembering is about being able to work backwards from your current high-entropy state to a low-entropy past. Imagine you have a photograph: if entropy was lower in the past, it probably resulted from the lower entropy situation of a camera photographing the subject. If it wasn't lower, then it might just be a random chance collection of atoms that used to be a high-entropy gas.
So to answer your question: antimatter is going to obey the same laws here as everything else. Entropy increases because we don't know anything about the future, and know that in the past it was lower. The same applies to antimatter.
Sorry for the wall of text - but if you're interested you should read this book, which does a remarkable job of explaining entropy.
No particular order:
Blind Descent by James M. Tabor. It is a great book about cave exploration and the race to discover the worlds deepest supercave.
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Are you interested in the universe and how it all happened? This gives some pretty insightful answers.
From Eternity To Here by Sean Carrol. A really interesting view on the nature and concept of time and how it relates to the us and the universe. It can get a bit deep from time to time, but I found it fascinating.
Adventures Among Ants by Mark W. Moffet. It's about ants. Seriously. Ants.
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. A first hand account of the ill-fated Scott expedition to the south pole in 1911-1912. Even after reading the book I cannot imagine what those men went through.
Bonus book: The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan. Human intelligence and how it evolved. Some really interesting stuff about the brain and how it works. A very enjoyable read.
Sean Carroll wrote a book about time too, where it's all about entropy. You can always check out the amazon page of a book for a summary. Here's Carroll's: http://www.amazon.com/From-Eternity-Here-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544
I don't personally subscribe to either view, I think time is more fundamental than entropy and there's no good reason to believe our universe "closes up on itself".
Also here's a short Carroll talk on the subject of time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMaTyg8wR4Y#
If you want a more detailed explanation, I highly recommend Sean Carroll's book, From Eternity To Here
http://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374221442&sr=1-5
He goes into entropy in depth among many other topics.
I just subscribed to this sub, and I'm so sad you didn't get any answers here. I came here after reading a few books that deal with the actual science behind the physics of time travel.
Here are a few to get you started.
How to Build a Time Machine
Time Travel and Warp Drives
I really recommend From Eternity to Here, it's just raw science on time, though there is an interesting chapter that really explains what it would take for travelling through time backwards. Overall, a very important read if you want to know what time actually is, compared to how we perceive it.
Also, I'll recommend the first book I started with, which I got into because I was writing a short story for a college class that involved time travel. It explains time travel and how to use it in fiction, so it's much less technical but gives a solid understanding as to how we would typically perceive the effects of them. it deals with getting paradoxes right etc. Here it is.
EDIT: Just realized all my links were to Canadian amazon, I'm sure they'll be on the US amazon if that's where you happen to live. Have fun!
I cannot recommend enough this book "From Eternity to Here", a book that explores time as a thermodynamic phenomenon.
https://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=
We know many things, and many questions are still unanswered.
http://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-Quest-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544/
I have read some Greene but I found Sean Carroll's "From Eternity to Here" much more illuminating in regards to the direction of time and entropy in general.
http://www.amazon.com/From-Eternity-Here-Ultimate-Theory/dp/0452296544