I'm amazed I just got the origin of the universe “explained” within an hour. Among other things, in this talk Sean Carroll first clearly explains the reason behind entropy: the future is one of possibilities, always more than a moment ago. The system is therefor much more likely to go forward through time and possibilities, than return to a more orderly state. It expresses itself as a force of form-creation and biological life, while at the same time inevitably exhausting itself into a dead cold future of thermal equilibrium. He then refutes Boltzmann's multiverse proposal to explain the origin of the order of the primal past (bigbang). The big a!-ha!-aha!-haha!-erlebnis came for me when he explained that the dead future is where we might have come from. Multiverse version 2 in a way, where the state of the (parent) universe, forced into maximalized entropic potential first, but then by the same statistical joke of life (entropy), becomes the ideal fertile ground for singularities to spawn new baby universes.
So I wonder, where is our universe now? adult yet? pre-teen? old and wizened? Or more importantly, are we ready to spawn baby universes of our own?
Part 1
Part 2
Speaking at the University of Sydney, acclaimed physicist and cosmologist Sean Carroll gives an entertaining and thought-provoking talk about the nature of time, the origin of entropy and how what happened before the Big Bang might be responsible for the arrow of time we observe today. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University and has previously worked at MIT. He is the author several acclaimed books. CHAST 2009 Templeton Lecture, University of Sydney
