Synopses & Reviews
Scientists have just announced an historic discovery on a par with the splitting of the atom: the Higgs boson, the key to understanding why mass exists has been found. In The Particle at the End of the Universe, Caltech physicist and acclaimed writer Sean Carroll takes readers behind the scenes of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to meet the scientists and explain this landmark event.
The Higgs boson is the particle that more than six thousand scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron Collider, the worldandrsquo;s largest and highest energy particle accelerator, which lies in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, as deep as 575 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It took ten years to build and this search has now cost over $9 billion and required the collaboration of engineers from more than one hundred countries.
What is so special about the Higgs boson? We didnandrsquo;t really know for sure if anything at the subatomic level had any mass at all until we found it. The fact is, while we have now essentially solved the mass puzzle, there are things we didnandrsquo;t predict and possibilities we havenandrsquo;t yet dreamed. A doorway is opening into the mind boggling, somewhat frightening world of dark matter. We only discovered the electron just over a hundred years ago and considering where that took usandmdash;from nuclear energy to quantum computing--the inventions that will result from the Higgs discovery will be world-changing.
The Particle at the End of the Universe not only explains the importance of the Higgs boson but also the Large Hadron Collider project itself. Projects this big donandrsquo;t happen without a certain amount of conniving, dealing, and occasional skullduggeryandmdash; and Sean Carroll explores it all. This is an irresistible story (including characters now set to win the Nobel Prize among other glories) about the greatest scientific achievement of our time.
Review
"Carroll....takes his readers on a fascinating and refreshing trek through every known back alley and cul de sac of quantum mechanics, relativity, cosmology and theoretical physics. The best way to grasp the rich mysteries of our universe is by constantly rereading the best and clearest explanations. Mr. Carroll's From Eternity to Here is certainly one of them." Wall Street Journal
Review
"Unifying cosmology, thermodynamics, and information science into a refreshingly accessible whole, From Eternity to Here will make you wish time's arrow could fly in reverse, if only so you could once again read the book for the first time." Seed Magazine
Review
"Stars as well as human beings are born, grow old, and die. In the 19th century scientists proposed the dismaying notion of the "heat death" of the universe, according to which every hot thing becomes tepid while all cool things become warm, so that in the end all matter exists at the same middling temperature and the future is an eternal unchanging tedium. Physicists have a word for this general tendency toward decay and dissipation: entropy. And entropy, as Sean Carroll, a physicist and cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, ably explains, is all about the directionality of time. The onward march of time fundamentally derives from something peculiar about the way the universe was born, and that's the puzzle Carroll attempts to resolve." David Lindley, The Wilson Quarterly
(read the entire The Wilson Quarterly review)
Synopsis
A rising star in theoretical physics offers his awesome vision of our universe and beyond, all beginning with a simple question: Why does time move forward?
Time moves forward, not backward — everyone knows you can't unscramble an egg. In the hands of one of today's hottest young physicists, that simple fact of breakfast becomes a doorway to understanding the Big Bang, the universe, and other universes, too.
In From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll argues that the arrow of time, pointing resolutely from the past to the future, owes its existence to conditions before the Big Bang itself-a period modern cosmology of which Einstein never dreamed. Increasingly, though, physicists are going out into realms that make the theory of relativity seem like child's play. Carroll's scenario is not only elegant, it's laid out in the same easy-to- understand language that has made his group blog, Cosmic Variance, the most popular physics blog on the Net.
From Eternity to Here uses ideas at the cutting edge of theoretical physics to explore how properties of spacetime before the Big Bang can explain the flow of time we experience in our everyday lives. Carroll suggests that we live in a baby universe, part of a large family of universes in which many of our siblings experience an arrow of time running in the opposite direction. It's an ambitious, fascinating picture of the universe on an ultra-large scale, one that will captivate fans of popular physics blockbusters like Elegant Universe and A Brief History of Time.
Synopsis
"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.
Synopsis
A rising star in theoretical physics offers his awesome vision of our universe and beyond, all beginning with a simple question: Why does time move forward? Time moves forward, not backward—everyone knows you can’t unscramble an egg. In the hands of one of today’s hottest young physicists, that simple fact of breakfast becomes a doorway to understanding the Big Bang, the universe, and other universes, too. In From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll argues that the arrow of time, pointing resolutely from the past to the future, owes its existence to conditions before the Big Bang itself— a period modern cosmology of which Einstein never dreamed. Increasingly, though, physicists are going out into realms that make the theory of relativity seem like child’s play. Carroll’s scenario is not only elegant, it’s laid out in the same easy-to- understand language that has made his group blog, Cosmic Variance, the most popular physics blog on the Net.
From Eternity to Here uses ideas at the cutting edge of theoretical physics to explore how properties of spacetime before the Big Bang can explain the flow of time we experience in our everyday lives. Carroll suggests that we live in a baby universe, part of a large family of universes in which many of our siblings experience an arrow of time running in the opposite direction. It’s an ambitious, fascinating picture of the universe on an ultra-large scale, one that will captivate fans of popular physics blockbusters like Elegant Universe and A Brief History of Time.
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Synopsis
Scientists have just announced an historic discovery on a par with the splitting of the atom: the Higgs boson, the key to understanding why mass exists has been found. In The Particle at the End of the Universe, Caltech physicist and acclaimed writer Sean Carroll takes readers behind the scenes of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to meet the scientists and explain this landmark event.
The Higgs boson is the particle that more than six thousand scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron Collider, the worldandrsquo;s largest and highest energy particle accelerator, which lies in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, as deep as 575 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It took ten years to build and this search has now cost over $9 billion and required the collaboration of engineers from more than one hundred countries.
What is so special about the Higgs boson? We didnandrsquo;t really know for sure if anything at the subatomic level had any mass at all until we found it. The fact is, while we have now essentially solved the mass puzzle, there are things we didnandrsquo;t predict and possibilities we havenandrsquo;t yet dreamed. A doorway is opening into the mind boggling, somewhat frightening world of dark matter. We only discovered the electron just over a hundred years ago and considering where that took usandmdash;from nuclear energy to quantum computing--the inventions that will result from the Higgs discovery will be world-changing.
The Particle at the End of the Universe not only explains the importance of the Higgs boson but also the Large Hadron Collider project itself. Projects this big donandrsquo;t happen without a certain amount of conniving, dealing, and occasional skullduggeryandmdash; and Sean Carroll explores it all. This is an irresistible story (including characters now set to win the Nobel Prize among other glories) about the greatest scientific achievement of our time.
About the Author
Sean Carroll, Ph.D., is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. After receiving his doctorate from Harvard University, he pursued his research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago. He has published papers on dark matter and dark energy, the physics of extra dimensions, and alternative theories of gravity as well as the graduate-level textbook Spacetime and Geometry. Sean Carroll is one of the founders of the group blog cosmicvariance.com, named one of the five top science blogs by Nature.