From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
- Description
- Product Details
- About the Author
- Read an Excerpt
-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.
ISBN-13: 9780452296541
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication Date: 10-26-2010
Pages: 464
Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range: 18 Years
SEAN CARROLL is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in 1993 from Harvard University. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Sloan Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London. His most recent award, in 2014, was from the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Carroll has appeared on The Colbert Report (twice), PBS’sNOVA, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and he frequently serves as a science consultant for film and television. He has been interviewed by various NPR shows, Scientific American, Wired, and The New York Times. He has given a TED talk on the multiverse that has more than one million views, and he has participated in a number of well-attended public debates concerning material in his new book, including one in New York City in 2014 with Eben Alexander.
Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication PART ONE - TIME, EXPERIENCE, AND THE UNIVERSE Chapter 1 - THE PAST IS PRESENT MEMORY Chapter 2 - THE HEAVY HAND OF ENTROPY Chapter 3 - THE BEGINNING AND END OF TIME PART TWO - TIME IN EINSTEIN’S UNIVERSE Chapter 4 - TIME IS PERSONAL Chapter 5 - TIME IS FLEXIBLE Chapter 6 - LOOPING THROUGH TIME PART THREE - ENTROPY AND TIME’S ARROW Chapter 7 - RUNNING TIME BACKWARD Chapter 8 - ENTROPY AND DISORDER Chapter 9 - INFORMATION AND LIFE Chapter 10 - RECURRENT NIGHTMARES Chapter 11 - QUANTUM TIME PART FOUR - FROM THE KITCHEN TO THE MULTIVERSE Chapter 12 - BLACK HOLES: THE ENDS OF TIME Chapter 13 - THE LIFE OF THE UNIVERSE Chapter 14 - INFLATION AND THE MULTIVERSE Chapter 15 - THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW Chapter 16 - EPILOGUE APPENDIX: MATH NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY Acknowledgements INDEX DUTTON Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First printing, January 2010 All rights reserved Photograph on page 37 by Martin Röll, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License, from Wikimedia Commons. Photograph on page 47 courtesy of the Huntington Library. Image on page 53 by the NASA/WMAP Science Team. Photograph on page 67 courtesy of Corbis Images. Image on page 119 courtesy of Getty Images. Figures on pages 147, 153, 177, 213, 270, 379, and 382 by Sean Carroll. Photograph on page 204 courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Photograph on page 259 courtesy of Professor Stephen Hawking. Photograph on page 267 courtesy of Professor Jacob Bekenstein. Photograph on page 295 by Jerry Bauer, from Wikimedia Commons. Photograph on page 315 courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All other images courtesy of Jason Torchinsky. REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Carroll, Sean M., 1966- From eternity to here : the quest for the ultimate theory of time / Sean Carroll. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 9781101152157 1. Space and time. I. Title. QC173.59.S65C37 2009 530.11—dc22 2009023828 Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content. To Jennifer For all time PROLOGUE Does anybody really know what time it is? —Chicago, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” This book is about the nature of time, the beginning of the universe, and the underlying structure of physical reality. We’re not thinking small here. The questions we’re tackling are ancient and honorable ones: Where did time and space come from? Is the universe we see all there is, or are there other “universes” beyond what we can observe? How is the future different from the past? According to researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary, time is the most used noun in the English language. We live through time, keep track of it obsessively, and race against it every day—yet, surprisingly, few people would be able to give a simple explanation of what time actually is. In the age of the Internet, we might turn to Wikipedia for guidance. As of this writing, the entry on “Time” begins as follows: Time is a component of a measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects. Time has been a major subject of religion, philosophy, and science, but defining time in a non-controversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars.1 Cosmology, the study of the whole universe, has made extraordinary strides over the past hundred years. Fourteen billion years ago, our universe (or at least the part of it we can observe) was in an unimaginably hot, dense state that we call “the Big Bang.” Ever since, it has been expanding and cooling, and it looks like that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future, and possibly forever. A century ago, we didn’t know any of that—scientists understood basically nothing about the structure of the universe beyond the Milky Way galaxy. Now we have taken the measure of the observable universe and are able to describe in detail its size and shape, as well as its constituents and the outline of its history. But there are important questions we cannot answer, especially concerning the early moments of the Big Bang. As we will see, those questions play a crucial role in our understanding of time—not just in the far-flung reaches of the cosmos, but in our laboratories on Earth and even in our everyday lives. TIME SINCE THE BIG BANG It’s clear that the universe evolves as time passes—the early universe was hot and dense; the current universe is cold and dilute. But I am going to be drawing a much deeper connection. The most mysterious thing about time is that it has a direction: the past is different from the future. That’s the arrow of time—unlike directions in space, all of which are created pretty much equal, the universe indisputably has a preferred orientation in time. A major theme of this book is that the arrow of time exists because the universe evolves in a certain way. The reason why time has a direction is because the universe is full of irreversible processes—things that happen in one direction of time, but never the other. You can turn an egg into an omelet, as the classic example goes, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg. Milk disperses into coffee; fuels undergo combustion and turn into exhaust; people are born, grow older, and die. Everywhere in Nature we find sequences of events where one kind of event always happens before, and another kind after; together, these define the arrow of time. Remarkably, a single concept underlies our understanding of irreversible processes: something called entropy, which measures the “disorderliness” of an object or conglomeration of objects. Entropy has a stubborn tendency to increase, or at least stay constant, as time passes—that’s the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics. 2 And the reason why entropy wants to increase is deceptively simple: There are more ways to be disorderly than to be orderly, so (all else being equal) an orderly arrangement will naturally tend toward increasing disorder. It’s not that hard to scramble the egg molecules into the form of an omelet, but delicately putting them back into the arrangement of an egg is beyond our capabilities. The traditional story that physicists tell themselves usually stops there. But there is one absolutely crucial ingredient that hasn’t received enough attention: If everything in the universe evolves toward increasing disorder, it must have started out in an exquisitely ordered arrangement. This whole chain of logic, purporting to explain why you can’t turn an omelet into an egg, apparently rests on a deep assumption about the very beginning of the universe: It was in a state of very low entropy, very high order. The arrow of time connects the early universe to something we experience literally every moment of our lives. It’s not just breaking eggs, or other 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 (if you prefer) we seem to move through time. It’s why we remember the past, but not the future. It’s why we evolve and metabolize and eventually die. It’s why we believe in cause and effect, and is crucial to our notions of free will. And it’s all because of the Big Bang. WHAT WE SEE ISN’T ALL THERE IS The mystery of the arrow of time comes down to this: Why were conditions in the early universe set up in a very particular way, in a configuration of low entropy that enabled all of the interesting and irreversible processes to come? That’s the question this book sets out to address. Unfortunately, no one yet knows the right answer. But we’ve reached a point in the development of modern science where we have the tools to tackle the question in a serious way. Scientists and prescientific thinkers have always tried to understand time. In ancient Greece, the pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides staked out different positions on the nature of time: Heraclitus stressed the primacy of change, while Parmenides denied the reality of change altogether. The nineteenth century was the heroic era of statistical mechanics—deriving the behavior of macroscopic objects from their microscopic constituents—in which figures like Ludwig Boltzmann, James Clerk Maxwell, and Josiah Willard Gibbs worked out the meaning of entropy and its role in irreversible processes. But they didn’t know about Einstein’s general relativity, or about quantum mechanics, and certainly not about modern cosmology. For the first time in the history of science, we at least have a chance of putting together a sensible theory of time and the evolution of the universe. I’m going to suggest the following way out: The Big Bang was not the beginning of the universe. Cosmologists sometimes say that the Big Bang represents a true boundary to space and time, before which nothing existed—indeed, time itself did not exist, so the concept of “before” isn’t strictly applicable. But we don’t know enough about the ultimate laws of physics to make a statement like that with confidence. Increasingly, scientists are taking seriously the possibility that the Big Bang is not really a beginning—it’s just a phase through which the universe goes, or at least our part of the universe. If that’s true, the question of our low-entropy beginnings takes on a different cast: not “Why did the universe start out with such a low entropy?” but rather “Why did our part of the universe pass through a period of such low entropy?” That might not sound like an easier question, but it’s a different one, and it opens up a new set of possible answers. Perhaps the universe we see is only part of a much larger multiverse, which doesn’t start in a low-entropy configuration at all. I’ll argue that the most sensible model for the multiverse is one in which entropy increases because entropy can always increase—there is no state of maximum entropy. As a bonus, the multiverse can be completely symmetric in time: From some moment in the middle where entropy is high, it evolves in the past and future to states where the entropy is even higher. The universe we see is a tiny sliver of an enormously larger ensemble, and our particular journey from a dense Big Bang to an everlasting emptiness is all part of the wider multiverse’s quest to increase its entropy. That’s one possibility, anyway. I’m putting it out there as an example of the kind of scenarios cosmologists need to be contemplating, if they want to take seriously the problems raised by the arrow of time. But whether or not this particular idea is on the right track, the problems themselves are fascinating and real. Through most of this book, we’ll be examining the problems of time from a variety of angles—time travel, information, quantum mechanics, the nature of eternity. When we aren’t sure of the final answer, it behooves us to ask the question in as many ways as possible. THERE WILL ALWAYS BE SKEPTICS Not everyone agrees that cosmology should play a prominent role in our understanding of the arrow of time. I once gave a colloquium on the subject to a large audience at a major physics department. One of the older professors in the department didn’t find my talk very convincing and made sure that everyone in the room knew of his unhappiness. The next day he sent an e—mail around to the department faculty, which he was considerate enough to copy to me: Finally, the magnitude of the entropy of the universe as a function of time is a very interesting problem for cosmology, but to suggest that a law of physics depends on it is sheer nonsense. Carroll’s statement that the second law owes its existence to cosmology is one of the dummest [sic] remarks I heard in any of our physics colloquia, apart from [redacted]’s earlier remarks about consciousness in quantum mechanics. I am astounded that physicists in the audience always listen politely to such nonsense. Afterwards, I had dinner with some graduate students who readily understood my objections, but Carroll remained adamant. I hope he reads this book. Many dramatic-sounding statements are contained herein, but I’m going to be as careful as possible to distinguish among three different types: (1) remarkable features of modern physics that sound astonishing but are nevertheless universally accepted as true; (2) sweeping claims that are not necessarily accepted by many working physicists but that should be, as there is no question they are correct; and (3) speculative ideas beyond the comfort zone of contemporary scientific state of the art. We certainly won’t shy away from speculation, but it will always be clearly labeled. When all is said and done, you’ll be equipped to judge for yourself which parts of the story make sense. The subject of time involves a large number of ideas, from the everyday to the mind-blowing. We’ll be looking at thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, information theory, cosmology, particle physics, and quantum gravity. Part One of the book can be thought of as a lightning tour of the terrain—entropy and the arrow of time, the evolution of the universe, and different conceptions of the idea of “time” itself. Then we will get a bit more systematic; in Part Two we will think deeply about spacetime and relativity, including the possibility of travel backward in time. In Part Three we will think deeply about entropy, exploring its role in multiple contexts, from the evolution of life to the mysteries of quantum mechanics. In Part Four we will put it all together to confront head-on the mysteries that entropy presents to the modern cosmologist: What should the universe look like, and how does that compare to what it actually does look like? I’ll argue that the universe doesn’t look anything like it “should,” after being careful about what that is supposed to mean—at least, not if the universe we see is all there is. If our universe began at the Big Bang, it is burdened with a finely tuned boundary condition for which we have no good explanation. But if the observed universe is part of a bigger ensemble—the multiverse—then we might be able to explain why a tiny part of that ensemble witnesses such a dramatic change in entropy from one end of time to the other. All of which is unapologetically speculative but worth taking seriously. The stakes are big—time, space, the universe—and the mistakes we are likely to make along the way will doubtless be pretty big as well. It’s sometimes helpful to let our imaginations roam, even if our ultimate goal is to come back down to Earth and explain what’s going on in the kitchen. PART ONE TIME, EXPERIENCE, AND THE UNIVERSE 1 THE PAST IS PRESENT MEMORY What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not. —St. Augustine, Confessions The next time you find yourself in a bar, or on an airplane, or standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, you can pass the time by asking the strangers around you how they would define the word time. That’s what I started doing, anyway, as part of my research for this book. You’ll probably hear interesting answers: “Time is what moves us along through life,” “Time is what separates the past from the future,” “Time is part of the universe,” and more along those lines. My favorite was “Time is how we know when things happen.” All of these concepts capture some part of the truth. We might struggle to put the meaning of “time” into words, but like St. Augustine we nevertheless manage to deal with time pretty effectively in our everyday lives. Most people know how to read a clock, how to estimate the time it will take to drive to work or make a cup of coffee, and how to manage to meet their friends for dinner at roughly the appointed hour. Even if we can’t easily articulate what exactly it is we mean by “time,” its basic workings make sense at an intuitive level. Like a Supreme Court justice confronted with obscenity, we know time when we see it, and for most purposes that’s good enough. But certain aspects of time remain deeply mysterious. Do we really know what the word means? WHAT WE MEAN BY TIME The world does not present us with abstract concepts wrapped up with pretty bows, which we then must work to understand and reconcile with other concepts. Rather, the world presents us with phenomena, things that we observe and make note of, from which we must then work to derive concepts that help us understand how those phenomena relate to the rest of our experience. For subtle concepts such as entropy, this is pretty clear. You don’t walk down the street and bump into some entropy; you have to observe a variety of phenomena in nature and discern a pattern that is best thought of in terms of a new concept you label “entropy.” Armed with this helpful new concept, you observe even more phenomena, and you are inspired to refine and improve upon your original notion of what entropy really is. For an idea as primitive and indispensable as “time,” the fact that we invent the concept rather than having it handed to us by the universe is less obvious—time is something we literally don’t know how to live without. Nevertheless, part of the task of science (and philosophy) is to take our intuitive notion of a basic concept such as “time” and turn it into something rigorous. What we find along the way is that we haven’t been using this word in a single unambiguous fashion; it has a few different meanings, each of which merits its own careful elucidation. Time comes in three different aspects, all of which are going to be important to us. 1. Time labels moments in the universe. Time is a coordinate; it helps us locate things. 2. Time measures the duration elapsed between events. Time is what clocks measure. 3. Time is a medium through which we move. Time is the agent of change. We move through it, or—equivalently—time flows past us, from the past, through the present, toward the future. At first glance, these all sound somewhat similar. Time labels moments, it measures duration, and it moves from past to future—sure, nothing controversial about any of that. But as we dig more deeply, we’ll see how these ideas don’t need to be related to one another—they represent logically independent concepts that happen to be tightly intertwined in our actual world. Why that is so? The answer matters more than scientists have tended to think. 1. Time labels moments in the universe John Archibald Wheeler, an influential American physicist who coined the term black hole, was once asked how he would define “time.” After thinking for a while, he came up with this: “Time is Nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” There is a lot of truth there, and more than a little wisdom. When we ordinarily think about the world, not as scientists or philosophers but as people getting through life, we tend to identify “the world” as a collection of things, located in various places. Physicists combine all of the places together and label the whole collection “space,” and they have different ways of thinking about the kinds of things that exist in space—atoms, elementary particles, quantum fields, depending on the context. But the underlying idea is the same. You’re sitting in a room, there are various pieces of furniture, some books, perhaps food or other people, certainly some air molecules—the collection of all those things, everywhere from nearby to the far reaches of intergalactic space, is “the world.” And the world changes. We find objects in some particular arrangement, and we also find them in some other arrangement. (It’s very hard to craft a sensible sentence along those lines without referring to the concept of time.) But we don’t see the different configurations “simultaneously,” or “at once.” We see one configuration—here you are on the sofa, and the cat is in your lap—and then we see another configuration—the cat has jumped off your lap, annoyed at the lack of attention while you are engrossed in your book. So the world appears to us again and again, in various configurations, but these configurations are somehow distinct. Happily, we can label the various configurations to keep straight which is which—Miss Kitty is walking away “now”; she was on your lap “then.” That label is time. So the world exists, and what is more, the world happens, again and again. In that sense, the world is like the different frames of a film reel—a film whose camera view includes the entire universe. (There are also, as far as we can tell, an infinite number of frames, infinitesimally separated.) But of course, a film is much more than a pile of individual frames. Those frames better be in the right order, which is crucial for making sense of the movie. Time is the same way. We can say much more than “that happened,” and “that also happened,” and “that happened, too.” We can say that this happened before that happened, and the other thing is going to happen after. Time isn’t just a label on each instance of the world; it provides a sequence that puts the different instances in order. A real film, of course, doesn’t include the entire universe within its field of view. Because of that, movie editing typically involves “cuts”—abrupt jumps from one scene or camera angle to another. Imagine a movie in which every single transition between two frames was a cut to a completely different scene. When shown through a projector, it would be incomprehensible—on the screen it would look like random static. Presumably there is some French avant-garde film that has already used this technique. The real universe is not an avant-garde film. We experience a degree of continuity through time—if the cat is on your lap now, there might be some danger that she will stalk off, but there is little worry that she will simply dematerialize into nothingness one moment later. This continuity is not absolute, at the microscopic level; particles can appear and disappear, or at least transform under the right conditions into different kinds of particles. But there is not a wholesale rearrangement of reality from moment to moment. This phenomenon of persistence allows us to think about “the world” in a different way. Instead of a collection of things distributed through space that keep changing into different configurations, we can think of the entire history of the world, or any particular thing in it, in one fell swoop. Rather than thinking of Miss Kitty as a particular arrangement of cells and fluids, we can think of her entire life stretching through time, from birth to death. The history of an object (a cat, a planet, an electron) through time defines its world line—the trajectory the object takes through space as time passes.3 The world line of an object is just the complete set of positions the object has in the world, labeled by the particular time it was in each position. Figure 1: The world, ordered into different moments of time. Objects (including people and cats) persist from moment to moment, defining world lines that stretch through time. Finding ourselves Thinking of the entire history of the universe all at once, rather than thinking of the universe as a set of things that are constantly moving around, is the first step toward thinking of time as “kind of like space,” which we will examine further in the chapters to come. We use both time and space to help us pinpoint things that happen in the universe. When you want to meet someone for coffee, or see a certain showing of a movie, or show up for work along with everyone else, you need to specify a time: “Let’s meet at the coffee shop at 6:00 P.M. this Thursday.” If you want to meet someone, of course, it’s not sufficient just to specify a time; you also need to specify a place. (Which coffee shop are we talking about here?) Physicists say that space is “three-dimensional.” What that means is that we require three numbers to uniquely pick out a particular location. If the location is near the Earth, a physicist might give the latitude, longitude, and height above ground. If the location is somewhere far away, astronomically speaking, we might give its direction in the sky (two numbers, analogous to latitude and longitude), plus the distance from Earth. It doesn’t matter how we choose to specify those three numbers; the crucial point is that you will always need exactly three. Those three numbers are the coordinates of that location in space. We can think of a little label attached to each point, telling us precisely what the coordinates of that point are. Figure 2: Coordinates attached to each point in space. In everyday life, we can often shortcut the need to specify all three coordinates of space. If you say “the coffee shop at Eighth and Main Street,” you’re implicitly giving two coordinates—“Eighth” and “Main Street”—and you’re assuming that we all agree the coffee shop is likely to be at ground level, rather than in the air or underground. That’s a convenience granted to us by the fact that much of the space we use to locate things in our daily lives is effectively two-dimensional, confined near the surface of the Earth. But in principle, all three coordinates are needed to specify a point in space. Each point in space occurs once at each moment of time. If we specify a certain location in space at one definite moment in time, physicists call that an event. (This is not meant to imply that it’s an especially exciting event; any random point in empty space at any particular moment of time would qualify, so long as it’s uniquely specified.) What we call the “universe” is just the set of all events—every point in space, at every moment of time. So we need four numbers—three coordinates of space, and one of time—to uniquely pick out an event. That’s why we say that the universe is four-dimensional. This is such a useful concept that we will often treat the whole collection, every point in space at every moment of time, as a single entity called spacetime. This is a big conceptual leap, so it’s worth pausing to take it in. It’s natural to think of the world as a three-dimensional conglomeration that keeps changing (“happening over and over again, slightly differentlyRead an Excerpt
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.