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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Shepherding a book from conception to publication is a remarkably collaborative effort, and there are many people who deserve thanks for helping me along the way. While this book was in its very early stages, I had the good fortune to meet, fall in love with, and marry a person who just happened to be an extraordinarily talented science writer. All the thanks I can give to Jennifer Ouellette, who improved the book immensely and made the journey worthwhile.
I sent drafts of the manuscript to a large number of my friends, and they responded with remarkably good humor and irritatingly sensible suggestions for improvement. Enormous thanks to Scott Aaronson, Allyson Beatrice, Jennie Chen, Stephen Flood, David Grae, Lauren Gunderson, Robin Hanson, Matt Johnson, Chris Lackner, Tom Levenson, Karen Lorre, George Musser, Huw Price, Ted Pyne, Mari Ruti, Alex Singer, and Mark Trodden, for keeping me honest along the way. I suspect most of them will be writing books of their own in the near future, and I’ll be happy to read all of them.
I’ve been talking about the arrow of time and other issues contained herein with my fellow scientists for years now, and it’s impossible to disentangle who made what contribution to my thinking. In addition to the readers mentioned above, I’d like to thank Anthony Aguirre, David Albert, Andreas Albrecht, Tom Banks, Raphael Bousso, Eddie Farhi, Brian Greene, Jim Hartle, Kurt Hinterbichler, Tony Leggett, Andrei Linde, Laura Mersini, Ken Olum, Don Page, John Preskill, Iggy Sawicki, Cosma Shalizi, Mark Srednicki, Kip Thorne, Alex Vilenkin, and Robert Wald (plus others I’ve doubtless shamefully forgotten) for conversations over the years. I’d like to offer special thanks to Jennie Chen, who not only read the manuscript carefully but was a valued collaborator when I first started taking the arrow of time seriously.
More recently, I’ve been a neglectful collaborator myself, as I worked to finish this book while my colleagues forged ahead on our research projects. So thanks/ apologies to Lotty Ackerman, Matt Buckley, Claudia de Rham, Tim Dulaney, Adrienne Erickcek, Moira Gresham, Matt Johnson, Marc Kamionkowski, Sonny Mantry, Michael Ramsey-Musolf, Lisa Randall, Heywood Tam, Chien-Yao Tseng, Ingunn Wehus, and Mark Wise, for putting up with me in recent days when my attention wasn’t always fully on the task at hand.
Katinka Matson and John Brockman were instrumental in turning my original notions into a sensible idea for a book, and generally in making things happen. I first met my editor Stephen Morrow years before this book was conceived, and it was a pleasure to get the chance to work with him. Jason Torchinsky took my meager sketches and turned them into compelling illustrations. Somehow Michael Bérubé, through the mediation of Elliot Tarabour, managed to offer a review of the book before it was actually written. But for a work about the nature of time, what else should we expect?
I’m the kind of person who grows restless working at home or in the office for too long, so I frequently gather up my physics books and papers and bring them to a restaurant or coffee shop for a change of venue. Almost inevitably, a stranger will ask me what it is I’m reading, and—rather than being repulsed by all the forbidding math and science—follow up with more questions about cosmology, quantum mechanics, the universe. At a pub in London, a bartender scribbled down the ISBN number of Scott Do
delson’s Modern Cosmology; at the Green Mill jazz club in Chicago, I got a free drink for explaining dark energy. I would like to thank every person who is not a scientist but maintains a sincere fascination with the inner workings of Nature, and is willing to ask questions and mull over the answers. Thinking about the nature of time might not help us build better TV sets or lose weight without exercising, but we all share the same universe, and the urge to understand it is part of what makes us human.
INDEX
Abbott, Edwin A.
acceleration
and Boltzmann brains
and expansion of the universe
and relativity
and special relativity
and time travel
and velocity
and wormholes
Achatz, Grant
Acta Mathematica
Aeneid (Virgil)
aether
Aguirre, Anthony
À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust)
Albert, David
Albrecht, Andreas
algorithmic complexity
“All You Zombies” (Heinlein)
Alpher, Ralph
Amis, Martin
anisotropies
Annalen der Physik
Annie Hall (1977)
anthropic principle
and arrow of time
and Boltzmann brains
and the current state of the universe
and multiverse hypothesis
and natural theology
and recurrence
anti-de Sitter space
antiparticles
antiquarks
Arcadia (Stoppard)
Aristotle
Arroway, Ellie (fictional character)
arrow of time
and baby universes
and the Big Bang
and black holes
and bouncing-universe cosmology
and checkerboard world exercise
and Chronology Protection Conjecture
and de Sitter space
and the early universe
and elementary particles
and entropy
and evolution of space of states
familiarity of
and free will
and gas distribution
and Gold cosmology
and information
and initial conditions of the universe
and irreversibility
and location in space
and many-worlds interpretation
and memory
and multiverse model
nonstandard versions
and the Past Hypothesis
and perception of the world
and possibilism
and Principle of Indifference
and quantum mechanics
and recurrence problem
and remembering the future
and spacetime
and state of physical systems
and Steady State cosmology
and symmetry
and temporal chauvinism
time contrasted with space
and wave functions
and white holes
artificial gravity
asymmetry of time
and the Big Bang
and cause and effect
and entropy
and inflationary cosmology
and parity violation
and possibilism
and white holes
atomic clocks
atomic nuclei
atomic theory
autonomous evolution of the universe
Avicenna
Avogadro’s Number
baby universes
background radiation. See cosmic microwave background radiation
background time
Back to the Future (1985)
Baker, Nicholson
Banks, Tom
Bekenstein, Jacob
Bekenstein-Hawking entropy
Bell, John
Bennett, Charles
Berlioz, Hector
Bernoulli, Daniel
Big Bang
and the arrow of time
and black holes
and bouncing-universe cosmology
and bubbles of true vacuum
and the current state of the universe
and definition of the universe
and definition of time
and de Sitter space
and directionality of time
and entropy
and the horizon problem
and inflationary cosmology
and initial conditions of the universe
and light cones
and lumpiness of the universe
and microwave background radiation
and natural theology
and the observable universe
problems with
and recurrence theorem
and singularity hypothesis
speculative theories
time before
time since
and time symmetry
and uniformity
uses for term
Big Crunch
and black holes
and cosmological constant
debate on
and de Sitter space
and empty space
and lumpiness of the universe
and time asymmetry
and time reversibility
and time symmetry
biophysics
biosphere and biological processes
blackbody radiation
black holes. See also event horizons; singularities
and arrow of time
and baby universes model
and closed timelike curves
and entropy
evaporation of
and growth of structure
and Hawking radiation
and holographic principle
and information
and Laplace
and particle accelerators
and quantum tunneling
and quasars
and the real world
and redshift
and spacetime
and string theory
thermodynamic analogy
and uncertainty principle
uniformity of
The Black Hole Wars (Susskind)
block time/block universe perspective
Bohr, Niels
Boltzmann, Emma
Boltzmann, Ludwig
and anthropic principle
and arrow of time
and atomic theory
and black holes
death
and de Sitter space
and entropy
and the H-Theorem
and initial conditions of the universe
and kinetic theory
and Loschmidt’s reversibility objection
and Past Hypothesis
and Principle of Indifference
and recurrence theorem
and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
and statistical mechanics
Boltzmann brains
Boltzmann-Lucretius scenario
Bondi, Hermann
boost.
bosons
bouncing-universe cosmology
boundary conditions
and cause and effect
described
and initial conditions of the universe
and irreversibility
and Maxwell’s Demon
and recurrence theorem
and time symmetry
Bousso, Raphael
Brahe, Tycho
branes
Brillouinéon
brown dwarfs
Brownian motion
Bruno, Giordano
bubbles of vacuum
Buddhism
Bureau of Longitude
Callender, Craig
Callisto
caloric
Calvin, John
Calvino, Italo
Carnot, Lazare
Carnot, Nicolas Léonard Sadi
Carrey, Jim
Carroll, Lewis
cause and effect
celestial mechanics
cellular automata
CERN
C-field
Chandrasekhar Limit
chaotic dynamics
The Character of Physical Law (Feynman)
charge
charge conjugation
checkerboard world exercise
and arrow of time
background of
and conservation of information
and Hawking radiation
and holographic principle
and information loss
and interaction effects
and irreversibility
and Principle of Indifference
and symmetry
and testing hypotheses
chemistry
Chen, Jennifer
choice
Chronology Protection Conjecture
circles in time. See closed timelike curves (CTCs)
circular-time universe
classical mechanics
and anthropic principle
and black holes
and conservation of energy
and creation of the universe
and elementary particles
and Laplace
and light cones
and loops in time
and maximizing entropy
and Michelson-Morley experiment
and momentum
and observation
and prediction
and quantum wave functions
and recurrence theorem
and relativity
and spacetime
and state of physical systems
and three-body problems
and time reversal
and time travel
Clausius, Rudolf
and definition of life
and empiricism
and entropy
and kinetic theory
and Maxwell’s Demon
and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
and statistical mechanics
and vacuum energy
clinamen (the swerve)
clocks
and curvature of spacetime
and definition of time
and manipulating time
and relativity
and special relativity
and time travel
closed systems
and autonomous evolution of the universe
and comoving patch of space
and creationism
and determinism
and entropy
and Gott time machines
and inflationary cosmology