This is, however, completely wrong: even if you place a clock on the table and compare it, after a few years, with one sitting at the floor, the two will differ. Let’s start with perhaps the most fundamental aspect of time: it, we believe, passes everywhere at the very same speed. Hence the title of this part: as we discovered more and more about time, it slowly disintegrated to mean something pretty much counter-intuitive: a complex collection of structures and layers which is neither unified nor independent, and which has neither a direction nor definite value. One after another, the characteristic features of time have proved to be approximations, mistakes determined by our perspective, just like the flatness of the Earth or the revolving of the sun.

The past is fixed, the future open… And yet all of this has turned out to be false. In the course of time, the events of the universe succeed each other in an orderly way: pasts, presents, futures. We conventionally think of time as something simple and fundamental that flows uniformly, independently from everything else, from the past to the future, measured by clocks and watches. “It is like holding a snowflake in your hands,” he poetically notes, “gradually, as you study it, it melts between your fingers and vanishes”: In the first-and perhaps most interesting-part (especially for novices) of The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli summarizes what modern physics knows about time. “Time works quite differently from the way it seems to,” says Rovelli, and he wastes no time to completely and utterly blow our minds what lies behind that sentence. The sun seems to revolve in the sky when it is really we who are spinning.”Īnalogously, even though time appears to be a uniform, universal flowing, it is anything but: we don’t inhabit it as fish swimming in the water (the water being the time in this metaphor), and it doesn’t drag the universe into the future from the past. “The Earth,” he goes on, “appears to be flat but is in fact spherical. “Reality is often very different from what it seems,” writes Carlo Rovelli in the “Introduction” to The Order of Time, aptly dubbed “Perhaps Time Is the Greatest Mystery.” Rovelli’s beautiful Seven Brief Lessons on Physics has been translated into no less than 40 languages and has sold over a million copies worldwide this one, The Order of Time, was chosen as one of TIME’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of 2018.įind out more at.

Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist, founder of loop quantum gravity theory, and one of Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential global thinkers.Ī regular collaborator with several Italian newspapers, Rovelli is one of the great popularizers of science, dubbed “the new Stephen Hawking” by The Sunday Times, and “the poet of quantum physics” by Ireland’s greatest modern novelist, John Banville.

The order of time rovelli