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Authors: Sean Carroll

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Shepherding a book from conception to publication is a remarkably collaborative effort, and there are many people who deserve thanks for helping me along the way. While this book was in its very early stages, I had the good fortune to meet, fall in love with, and marry a person who just happened to be an extraordinarily talented science writer. All the thanks I can give to Jennifer Ouellette, who improved the book immensely and made the journey worthwhile.

I sent drafts of the manuscript to a large number of my friends, and they responded with remarkably good humor and irritatingly sensible suggestions for improvement. Enormous thanks to Scott Aaronson, Allyson Beatrice, Jennie Chen, Stephen Flood, David Grae, Lauren Gunderson, Robin Hanson, Matt Johnson, Chris Lackner, Tom Levenson, Karen Lorre, George Musser, Huw Price, Ted Pyne, Mari Ruti, Alex Singer, and Mark Trodden, for keeping me honest along the way. I suspect most of them will be writing books of their own in the near future, and I’ll be happy to read all of them.

I’ve been talking about the arrow of time and other issues contained herein with my fellow scientists for years now, and it’s impossible to disentangle who made what contribution to my thinking. In addition to the readers mentioned above, I’d like to thank Anthony Aguirre, David Albert, Andreas Albrecht, Tom Banks, Raphael Bousso, Eddie Farhi, Brian Greene, Jim Hartle, Kurt Hinterbichler, Tony Leggett, Andrei Linde, Laura Mersini, Ken Olum, Don Page, John Preskill, Iggy Sawicki, Cosma Shalizi, Mark Srednicki, Kip Thorne, Alex Vilenkin, and Robert Wald (plus others I’ve doubtless shamefully forgotten) for conversations over the years. I’d like to offer special thanks to Jennie Chen, who not only read the manuscript carefully but was a valued collaborator when I first started taking the arrow of time seriously.

More recently, I’ve been a neglectful collaborator myself, as I worked to finish this book while my colleagues forged ahead on our research projects. So thanks/ apologies to Lotty Ackerman, Matt Buckley, Claudia de Rham, Tim Dulaney, Adrienne Erickcek, Moira Gresham, Matt Johnson, Marc Kamionkowski, Sonny Mantry, Michael Ramsey-Musolf, Lisa Randall, Heywood Tam, Chien-Yao Tseng, Ingunn Wehus, and Mark Wise, for putting up with me in recent days when my attention wasn’t always fully on the task at hand.

Katinka Matson and John Brockman were instrumental in turning my original notions into a sensible idea for a book, and generally in making things happen. I first met my editor Stephen Morrow years before this book was conceived, and it was a pleasure to get the chance to work with him. Jason Torchinsky took my meager sketches and turned them into compelling illustrations. Somehow Michael Bérubé, through the mediation of Elliot Tarabour, managed to offer a review of the book before it was actually written. But for a work about the nature of time, what else should we expect?

I’m the kind of person who grows restless working at home or in the office for too long, so I frequently gather up my physics books and papers and bring them to a restaurant or coffee shop for a change of venue. Almost inevitably, a stranger will ask me what it is I’m reading, and—rather than being repulsed by all the forbidding math and science—follow up with more questions about cosmology, quantum mechanics, the universe. At a pub in London, a bartender scribbled down the ISBN number of Scott Dodelson’s
Modern Cosmology
; at the Green Mill jazz club in Chicago, I got a free drink for explaining dark energy. I would like to thank every person who is not a scientist but maintains a sincere fascination with the inner workings of Nature, and is willing to ask questions and mull over the answers. Thinking about the nature of time might not help us build better TV sets or lose weight without exercising, but we all share the same universe, and the urge to understand it is part of what makes us human.

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