The Arrow of Time

Not to be confused with Richard Morris's Time's Arrows ( LJ 3/15/85) and Stephen Jay Gould's Time's Arrows, Time's Cycles ( LJ 3/15/87), this is the first American edition of a book originally published in Great Britain. Coveney and Highfield--a scientist and journalist, respectively--demonstrate how the everyday perception that time moves in one direction is consistent with advanced scientific theory. At the center of their theory is an intriguing interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the forces of entropy. The authors show that this concept has broad relevance in such fields as cosmology, evolution, and the emerging science of chaos. Not for the merely curious, this book cites Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time ( LJ 4/15/88) and James Gleick's Chaos ( LJ 8/87) and will appeal to readers with the relatively high level of scientific sophistication of those books. Generalists will find the aforementioned book by Morris to be more approachable.