What is time? Why does it only flow in one direction? The only time we ever ask these questions is when we're rewatching Back to the Future for the fourteenth time. When we ask these questions to our teachers, they either answer with a confused shrug or tell us to keep quiet. These are valid questions — they just don't have answers. But by asking these questions, we get new insight into how the universe works. Sean Carroll channels this infectious curiosity into his latest book/lecture series: Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time. He asks unanswerable questions and attempts to answer them, in the process gaining invaluable insight about one of the most commonplace yet perplexing phenomena of the universe: time.
The first questions Carroll asks, what is time, is not only the most vital, but also the most unclear. We seem to know everything about time except what it actually is. But Carroll, in asking this question, strikes a deeper truth: time and entropy are intertwined. Carroll then shifts his focus away from time and towards a broader vision of the cosmos and the universe itself. But Carroll also does something more significant: he shifts the way we view science. Instead of seeing it as a static, unchanging law written in a textbook, we move through old assumptions, incorrect science, and new knowledge, and we learn how important it is to ask questions; for only then does scientific truth emerge.
Carroll sticks mostly to basic facts and scientific realities in the book. However, he leaves the last few lectures to toy with our minds and ignite the possibilities. Here, Carroll taps into one of science's greatest allures: imagination. From black holes to time travel to wormholes to artificial gravity, Carroll explores all the possibilities the future could hold. Carroll explains with such depth and enthusiasm that you can't help but feel amazed and excited. For all its academic rigor, this book is at its best when it steps out of the rigid confines of proof and dares to ask questions no physicist would entertain.
The most puzzling aspect of this book is why Carroll evens bothers to ask unanswerable questions. How embarrassing is it to lecture to hundreds and then answer "I don't know" to a question? But Carroll asks these questions because a question without an answer ignites a fire, creates an idea, sparks a passion in others which makes them interested in physics. The true strength of Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time is not its intellectual rigor, but the burning fire it creates inside you.
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