What non-fiction book did you read in 2013 that you most recommend?

[DreamGypsy]

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

...by Cal Tech theoretical physicist, Sean Carroll.

A well written, well presented analysis of what we know and don't know about time. I found the material very accessible, though working through all the explanations required some diligence and not infrequent backward page turning to refresh my understanding.

You can get a better understanding of the intent and content of the book from Sean Carroll's website here:

Why do we remember the past, but not the future? Why don't we meet people who grow younger as they age? Why do things, left by themselves, tend to become messier and more chaotic? What would Maxwell's Demon say to a Boltzmann Brain?

The answers can be traced to the moment of the Big Bang -- or possibly before.

Time pervades our lives -- we keep track of it, lament its loss, put it to good use. The rhythms of our clocks and our bodies let us measure the passage of time, as a ruler lets us measure the distance between two objects. But unlike distances, time has a direction, pointing from past to future. From Eternity to Here examines this arrow of time, which is deeply ingrained in the universe around us. The early universe -- the hot, dense, Big Bang -- was very different from the late universe -- cool, empty, expanding space -- and that difference in felt in all the workings of Nature, from the melting of ice cubes to the evolution of species.

The arrow of time is easy to perceive, much harder to understand. Physicists appeal to the idea of entropy, the disorderliness of a system, which tends to increase according to the celebrated Second Law of Thermodynamics. But why was entropy ever small in the first place? That's a question that has been tackled by thinkers such as Ludwig Boltzmann, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Roger Penrose, and Alan Guth, all the way back to Lucretius in ancient Rome. But the answer remains elusive.

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If you don't want to spend time reading the ~400 pages of the book, there are two videos available at the link that provide less and more information about the book - 1). a 5 minute comedy interlude on the Colbert show with guest Sean Carroll; and, 2). a 16 minute TEDxCaltech talk by Sean Carroll on Cosmology and the Arrow of Time.