As promised, we’re going to have a book club to talk about From Eternity to Here. Roughly speaking, every Tuesday I’ll post about another chapter, and we’ll talk about it. Easy enough, right? (Chapters 4 and 5, about relativity, are pretty short and will be combined into one week.)

For the most part I won’t be summarizing each chapter — because you’ll all have read the book, so that would be boring. Instead, I want to give some behind-the-scenes insight about what was going through my mind when I put each chapter together — a little exclusive for readers of the blog. Of course, in the comments I hope we can discuss the substance of the chapters in as much detail as we like. I’m going to try to participate actively in all the discussions, so I hope to answer questions when I can — and certainly expect to learn something myself along the way.

The book is divided into four parts: an overview, spacetime and relativity, entropy and the Second Law, and a discussion of how it all fits into cosmology. You can find a more detailed table of contents here, and here is the prologue to get you in the mood. Part Three is definitely the high point of the book, so be sure to stick around for that.

So see you next Tuesday! Get reading!

Part One: Overview

• January 19: Chapter One (What is time?)
• January 26: Chapter Two (Entropy and the Second Law)
• February 2: Chapter Three (The expanding universe)

Part Two: Relativity

• February 9: Chapters Four and Five (Special and general relativity)
• February 16: Chapter Six (Time travel)

Part Three: Entropy and the Arrow of Time

• February 23: Chapter Seven (Determinism and reversibility)
• March 2: Chapter Eight (Entropy according to Boltzmann)
• March 9: Chapter Nine (Information, memory, life…)
• March 16: Chapter Ten (Recurrence and Boltzmann brains)
• March 23: Chapter Eleven (Quantum mechanics)

Part Four: Time and the Universe

• March 30: Chapter Twelve (Black holes)
• April 6: Chapter Thirteen (Evolution of the universe)
• April 13: Chapter Fourteen (Inflation)
• April 20: Chapter Fifteen and Epilogue (Explaining the arrow of time)