Time's Second Arrow: Evolution, Order, and a New Law of Nature
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A distinguished geoscientist and rising-star astrobiologist offer a stunning new theory upending 150 years of established science—and an inspiring new vision of our universe.
Of the codified laws of nature, famously, only one inscribes a direction to time: the dreaded second law of thermodynamics, which declares that the disorder of a closed system tends to increase as time passes. New shoes eventually scuff, our bodies weaken and die. Yet our senses tell us that miraculous order constantly emerges, too: children grow and learn; spontaneous patterns manifest in murmurations of starlings. Can it be true that the laws of our universe mandate only dissolution—rendering the intricate order of a butterfly’s wing, the much-vaunted complexity of the human brain, merely incidental?
In Time’s Second Arrow, star scientists Robert M. Hazen and Michael L. Wong overturn more than a century of scientific canon, arguing that, in fact, there must be a second “arrow of time”—a heretofore missing law of nature that explains how the marvelously complex constituents of our universe came to be. Evolution, they boldly propose, is a universal phenomenon—not only in biology, but in the entire atomic, chemical, mineral, and physical universe. Showing how a natural process of selection for increasing function has shaped the universe since its inception, they explore how this new law could possibly help us identify life on other planets and—perhaps—even understand the purpose and meaning of life on Earth in a new way.
Elegantly written and deeply moving, Time’s Second Arrow reveals how our cosmic inheritance includes, even alongside loss and decay, a drive toward wondrous invention and progress—ultimately revising our understanding of the universe and our place within it.
Praise for Time's Second Arrow: Evolution, Order, and a New Law of Nature
A paradigm-shifting work of scientific daring that inspires us to reconsider the emergence of life in the cosmos … [T]here are times when the facts alone exert their own poetry. When this happens in a science book, it can be transcendent.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Time’s Second Arrow…present[s] an audacious hypothesis: that the increasing complexity observable in the history of life, the universe, and everything reflects a fundamental, hitherto unrecognized law of nature…A laudably concise, compelling account of how everything around us came to be.
— Andrew H. Knoll, author of A Brief History of Earth
Time’s Second Arrow is bubbling with ideas, all inspired by one of the biggest outstanding questions in science: the origin and evolution of complexity. . . . The insights here help to move us toward a unified understanding of the physical and biological realms.
— Sean Carroll, New York Times best-selling author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe
Time’s Second Arrow makes the bold assertion that we may have been overlooking a new law of nature equivalent in importance to Isaac Newton’s laws of motion. . . . A joy to read . . . for anyone frustrated that the boundaries of natural laws don’t seem to describe the world we know completely.
— Karen G. Lloyd, author of Intraterrestrials
A delightful tour through the growing complexity of our Universe.
— Jack Szostak, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine
As Hamlet famously intones, ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ . . . [Time’s Second Arrow] show[s] how the existing suite of natural laws fail to account for everything that exists—and boldly propose[s] a new one. Essential reading.
— Stuart A. Kauffman, author of A World Beyond Physics
In this accessible and beautifully written book, Hazen and Wong propose a new law of nature to account for the remarkable ordering we observe in the cosmos at all scales. The secret, they claim, is that given many possible arrangements of matter, nature selects the most persistent structures, those optimized for longevity. It takes intellectual courage to propose profound new ideas in science, especially those focusing on why questions. I congratulate Hazen and Wong for exploring why complex things, including us, exist in a cosmos of growing disorder.
— Marcelo Gleiser, Professor of Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth College and author of The Dawn of a Mindful Universe
