The Labyrinth of Time: Introducing the Universe

Michael Lockwood0-19-924995-4, 9780199249954

SynopsisModern physics has revealed a universe that is a much stranger place than we could have imagined, filled with black holes and dark matter and parallel lines meeting in space. And the puzzle at the center of our present understanding of the universe is time.Now, in The Labyrinth of Time, Michael Lockwood takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the nature of things. A brilliant writer, Lockwood illuminates the philosophical questions about past, present, and future, our experience of time, and the possibility of time travel, in a book that is both challenging and great fun. Indeed, he provides the most careful, lively, and up-to-date introduction to the physics of time and the structure of the universe to be found anywhere in print. He guides us step by step through relativity theory and quantum physics, introducing and explaining the ground-breaking ideas of Newton and Boltzmann, Einstein and Schroedinger, Penrose and Hawking. We zoom in on the behavior of molecules and atoms, and pull back to survey the expansion of the universe. We learn about entropy and gravity, black holes and wormholes, about how it all began and where we are all headed.