More Entropy, Less Spanking

I'm currently a bit less than halfway through Sean Carroll's From Eternity to Here, which has leaped to the top of the literary inbox because I'll be hosting a Book Salon at firedoglake next Saturday evening. If you want to see how my limited typing skills work in a live chat setting, be sure to stop by. (I plan to type out a bunch of questions in advance, and then cut-and-paste them as needed.)

A little while back, somebody on Twitter referred to this as "Sean's arrow of time fetish book," which is a little unkind, but also funny and memorable. Sort of. My subconscious, trained by spending my grad school years on rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan, reflexively morphs any "[noun] of Time" phrase into "Wheel of Time."

And I have to say, "Sean Carroll's Wheel of Time fetish book" is a very different mental image... One that needs to be shared with you all. You can thank me later.

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Considering Wheel of Time is the book series that never ends (despite Robert Jordan's death), I'm thinking it's more a steady state model than one that has entropy.

It could be an open model, where the series just keeps on going while the average quality drops ever closer to absolute junk.

One way that Sean's book is like the second half of the WoT series (to date): No Moiraine.

By Tom Renbarger (not verified) on 25 Jan 2010 #permalink

Plenty of arrows, too. But does Sean explain the difference between Trolloc arrows and Mayene arrows? And more importantly, is braid-tugging and/or sniffing endothermic or exothermic?