Sean Carroll · 447 pages
Rating: (4.5K votes)
“This is not a universe that is advancing toward a goal; it is one that is caught in the grip of an unbreakable pattern.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“The ancient Greeks, according to Pirsig, “saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs, with the past receding away before their eyes.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“the interaction of gravity with other forces seems to be able to create order while still making the entropy go up—temporarily, anyway. That is a deep clue to something important about how the universe works; sadly, we aren’t yet sure what that clue is telling us.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“It’s possible that we are being watched and judged by a race of super-intelligent aliens, who will think badly of us and destroy the Earth if we allow ourselves to be cowed by frivolous lawsuits and don’t turn on the LHC. When possibilities become as remote as what we’re speaking about here, it’s time to take the risks and get on with our lives.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“The punch line is that our notion of free will, the ability to change the future by making choices in a way that is not available to us as far as the past is concerned, is only possible because the past has a low entropy and the future has a high entropy. The”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“(The neutron is a bit of a drama queen.)”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“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.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“The result is a complete fiasco. Our simple estimate of what the vacuum energy should be comes out to about 10105 joules per cubic centimeter. That’s a lot of vacuum energy. What we actually observe is about 10-15 joules per cubic centimeter. So our estimate is larger than the experimental value by a factor of 10120—a 1 followed by 120 zeroes. Not something we can attribute to experimental error. This has been called the biggest disagreement between theoretical expectation and experimental reality in all of science.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“If our lives are brief and undirected, at least we can take pride in our mutual courage as we struggle to understand things much greater than ourselves.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“Rµv - (1/2)Rgµv = 8πGTµv. This is the equation that a physicist would think of if you said “Einstein’s equation”; that E = mc2 business is a minor thing,”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“The behavior of temperature and heat and so forth can certainly be understood in terms of atoms: That’s the subject known as “statistical mechanics.” But it can equally well be understood without knowing anything whatsoever about atoms: That’s the phenomenological approach we’ve been discussing, known as “thermodynamics.” It is a common occurrence in physics that in complex, macroscopic systems, regular patterns emerge dynamically from underlying microscopic rules. Despite the way it is sometimes portrayed, there is no competition between fundamental physics and the study of emergent phenomena; both are fascinating and crucially important to our understanding of nature.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“the homunculus narrator experiences everything backward—his first memory is Unverdorben’s death. He has no control over Unverdorben’s actions, nor access to his memories, but passively travels through life in reverse order. At first Unverdorben appears to us as a doctor, which strikes the narrator as quite a morbid occupation—patients shuffle into the emergency room, where staff suck medicines out of their bodies and rip off their bandages, sending them out into the night bleeding and screaming. But near the end of the book, we learn that Unverdorben was an assistant at Auschwitz, where he created life where none had been before—turning chemicals and electricity and corpses into living persons. Only now, thinks the narrator, does the world finally make sense.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. —Stephen Toulmin”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“There is a famous joke, attributed to Einstein: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” I don’t know whether Einstein actually ever said those words. But I do know that’s not relativity.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“But what makes a good clock? The primary criterion is that it should be consistent—it wouldn’t do any good to have a clock that ticked really fast sometimes and really slowly at others.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“Everyone knows what a time machine looks like: something like a steampunk sled with a red velvet chair, flashing lights, and a giant spinning wheel on the back. For those of a younger generation, a souped-up stainless-steel sports car is an acceptable substitute; our British readers might think of a 1950s-style London police box.76 Details of operation vary from model to model,”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“C. P. Snow—British intellectual, physicist, and novelist—is perhaps best known for his insistence that the “Two Cultures” of the sciences and the humanities had grown apart and should both be a part of our common civilization.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
“The Big Bang model seems like a fairly natural picture, once you believe in an approximately uniform universe that is expanding in time. Just wind the clock backward, and you get a hot, dense beginning. Indeed, the basic framework was put together in the late 1920s by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest from Belgium”
― Sean Carroll, quote from From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
Sean Carroll
Born place: in The United States
See more on GoodReads
“Shit!” Evelgold added.
“What?” Hook asked, alarmed.
“I just stepped in some.”
“That’s supposed to bring you luck,” Hook said.
“Then I’d better dance in the goddam stuff.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Azincourt
“A grower of turnups Or shaper of clay, a commot Farmer or a king-Every man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Castle of Llyr
“Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi.”
― Dante Alighieri, quote from Vita Nuova
“Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest." William Gaddis, The Recognitions.”
― William Gaddis, quote from The Recognitions
“Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
Is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss
To pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.
His coat's very shabby, he's thin as a rake,
And he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake.
Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Cats —
But no longer a terror to mice or to rats.
For he isn't the Cat that he was in his prime;
Though his name was quite famous, he says, in his time.
And whenever he joins his friends at their club
(which takes place at the back of the neighbouring pub)
He loves to regale them, if someone else pays,
With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days.
For he once was a Star of the highest degree —
He has acted with Irving, he's acted with Tree.
And he likes to relate his success on the Halls,
Where the Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls.
But his grandest creation, as he loves to tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.”
― T.S. Eliot, quote from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
Reunion
The Lying Game
Grey
White Nights
Tarzan of the Apes
Blood of the FoldBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
