The Order of Time
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Certainly one of TIME’s Ten Greatest Nonfiction Books of the Decade
“Meet the brand new Stephen Hawking . . . The Order of Time is a stunning ebook.”—The Sunday Occasions
From the bestselling creator of Seven Transient Classes on Physics, Actuality Is Not What It Appears, Helgoland, and Anaximander comes a concise, elegant exploration of time.
Why can we bear in mind the previous and never the longer term? What does it imply for time to “stream”? Will we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invitations us to think about questions concerning the nature of time that proceed to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike.
For many that is unfamiliar terrain. All of us expertise time, however the extra scientists study it, the extra mysterious it stays. We consider it as uniform and common, shifting steadily from previous to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one after the other, revealing a wierd universe the place on the most basic stage time disappears. He explains how the speculation of quantum gravity makes an attempt to grasp and provides that means to the ensuing excessive panorama of this timeless world. Weaving collectively concepts from philosophy, science and literature, he means that our notion of the stream of time is determined by our perspective, higher understood ranging from the construction of our mind and feelings than from the bodily universe.
Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Transient Classes on Physics so interesting, The Order of Time provides a profoundly clever, culturally wealthy, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.
Prospects say
Prospects discover the ebook participating and well-written. They describe it as a basic that retains them engaged with its thought-provoking content material and poetic ending.
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Gary Moreau, Author –
Hawking & Sagan in one: An abstract journey sure to inform and entertain
Carlo Rovelli has the brilliance of Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein and the communicative skills of Carl Sagan. Otherwise he is an Italian theoretical physicist that specializes in quantum gravity and is a proponent, if not quite an advocate, of loop theory. Beyond that he is a philosopher with a heart for ancient poetry and love.And he brings all of it to bear in this delightful book about time, which, in the end, is life, and everything, including the context in which it unfolds. It would be in error to suggest that time doesnât exist, but it would be equally in error to suggest that time is as simple as the continuum we record with our clocks.What I like most about the book is the fact that Rovelli recognizes that philosophy and science, if not two sides of the same coin, are cousins. He refers to Proust, which few scientists do, and suggests that while reason is among the best tools available for interpreting our âcollective delirium,â it is âonly an instrument, a pincer.âThe science and the prose are very accessible. You will, however, have to be willing to think abstractly, a skill that in our wired, binary world seems to be greatly dissipating. And he is the first scientist I have read in a while who takes time to explain why the problem is sometimes not the science itself, but the limitations of language. Language is a human construction and has not kept up with our scientific revelation. Which is why theoretical physicists sometimes seem to be speaking another language. If only there was another language that was constructed in the world as we know it today, our communication would be so much easier and our knowledge would expand more rapidly.It would be impossible to summarize the knowledge contained in this book. You really have to read it. Here is a start, however: âThe world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.â If you can comprehend that the rest is largely additional perspective.And if the idea that universal time doesnât exist in any absolute sense seems a stretch, consider Rovelliâs simple explanation (Iâm paraphrasing): People never used to worry about clocks. They worried about the cycle of sunshine and darkness. But that cycle is different in every single village, town, and city on the planet. The cycle varies both east to west and north to south. And back when we used to spend our lives in our little village we didnât care. But then the scientists and engineers invented trains to take us from one village to the next. And people needed to know when the train left their village. But how can you develop a timetable when every village has its own time? You canât. But, at the same time, itâs not quite practical to say that the whole world has just one time. Farmers donât care what the sun is doing in London. They care what itâs doing on their farm. (China actually has no time zones by edict. The entire country is on Beijing time and there are significant practical limitations.) The solution was the time zone, and itâs a compromise. Time zones are a construct and practical in the local sense, but highly inaccurate when talking about the universe. In the language of theoretical physics, they donât exist.Eastern philosophers believe that reality is not knowable. It is real, but is made up of an infinite number of variables. We can only comprehend or think about a handful at a time. A tree is real. I can touch it and smell it. But it is not entirely knowable because there are too many variables (e.g. altitude, climate, soil, etc.) that define each tree for me to know them all. Time is the same way. Time is real but it is not knowable. Throw in the limitations of language and it begins to look like an illusion.To his great credit, Rovelli admits that there is much we donât know. Think of a Seurat painting that has been blacked out. We have exposed a few, perhaps 10% (my number), of the original dots of pigment. Itâs a lot, but weâre still guessing as to what the underlying picture is.And thatâs pretty exciting. The key to our understanding to date, however, is the second law of thermodynamics which states that entropy can never decrease. Itâs critical to our understanding of time, as Rovelli explains. Personally Iâm not convinced itâs inviolate. Perhaps we just havenât uncovered enough dots of pigment yet. If entropy could work both ways it would explain a lot, but attraction does not equal fact. (Entropy obviously has a big role in causality, of course. Bidirectional entropy would be a huge boost for inductive reason.)Itâs a short book and even if you get through a small amount of it you will learn a lot. Beyond writing in an accessible way, Rovelli comes off as very personable. The perfect person to sit down and share a cup of coffee with. If only he had the time. (Sorry)A marvelous book that I highly recommend.
Matthew Rapaport –
Well written read on a complex subject arguing for the popular view (in physics) that time does not exist
Like consciousness, time is a subject that no philosopher or physicist has ever managed to nail down completely. Thanks to their slippery character, being so close to us (the first one IS us) they are endless sources for fountains of speculation. In this book, Rovelli’s subject is time, but consciousness comes into this narrative as well.Rovelli is a “time denier”. OK, that’s being a little unfair but not by much. What he denies is that there exists an independent, fundamental property or quality of the universe that is time. Of course the universe is full of movement and change, events unfolding into other events. His basic position is that time emerges into our perspective, our viewpoint, from these phenomena, but it is merely an illusion. The movement is real, the changing is real, but the time in which all of this seems to occur is nothing more than a manifestation of human (possibly animal) mind and the illusion, in turn, is supported by the entropy generated in the functioning of our brains.The book (not long read) is divided into three parts. In the first Rovelli covers the various sub-disciplines of physics and their temporal implications (or lack thereof). He begins with classical physics (the equations work backwards in time), and moves on to General and Special Relativity, and quantum mechanics. Here he demonstrates that our simple intuition of a universal time flowing from past to future is untenable. Time, mind-independent time, if it exists at all, cannot be like that. In part two he further demolishes time. Not only is it not what we think, in and for physics, it doesn’t really exist at all; even the present is an illusion! In part three, he puts time back together for and in the perspective of an subjective viewpoint.He argues it is the fact that we view the world from a perspective, that when we perceive the world we inevitably blur the details into a sort of summary or gestalt for our perspective, that causes time to appear to mind, The physics supporting that appearance comes down to thermodynamics. Human time, brain time, is “thermal time”. Certainly Rovelli thinks thermodynamics (in particular the 2nd law) is real, but while responsible for what consciousness perceives of time and so a real enough subjective experience, from the 3rd party perspective of physics, change is real, but time is a mirage.This book is written for a lay audience. There is almost no math in it (what there is appears in footnotes), and it defends a view common to much of the physics and philosophy community. To be sure Rovelli differs a bit from some of his peers. He argues that relativistic “block time” is no more a “true portrait of objective time” than any other theory. In Rovelli’s view remember there is no such thing as “objective time”.In 2015 a philosopher (Roberto Unger) and a physicist (Lee Smolin) wrote “The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time”. This book (reviewed by me on Amazon) makes precisely the opposite case from that of Rovelli. Of course they recognize what Relativity and quantum mechanics imply about time, but they maintain, nevertheless, that a notion (and reality) of objective, “universal time”, is more fundamental than any other phenomena of the universe, even more than space! Rovelli mentions this book in a footnote and admits that Unger and Smolin’s view “is defensible”, but he leaves it there and never addresses what is defensible about it.The Unger/Smolin book goes against the grain of 95% of today’s physicists. Personally I agree with Smolin and Unger. The fact (thanks to limiting effect of the speed of light) that we cannot map our present to any present in a remote galaxy, or even the nearest star does not mean there is no present there, in fact everywhere. Something is happening, NOW, everywhere in the universe. We do not know what it is, but that does not mean the present isn’t real as Rovelli believes. Had Rovelli directly addressed Unger and Smolin I would have given this book another star. Had he not mentioned them at all, I would have taken another away.In summary this is a decent and well written book advocating for a particular view of time (or no time) that I happen to think is wrong, but what do I know? It happens to be the dominant view in physics today. Rovelli is a well respected physicist and a good writer. Those of you interested in the subject will find this book valuable whether you agree with the author or not.
Ellen Winner –
A beautiful explanation and exploration of the mysteries of time.
A delight to read, with emotional depth as well as intellectual rigor. It touches my heart to feel welcomed into Rovelliâs world of exploration of the mysteries of time, not only to understand the cold mechanics of their complexities but also their human meanings.
Brandon –
This book leans towards the more challenging end of off-the-shelf science topics. Carlo Rovelli explores what time means, its origins from both a scientific perspective and its uniqueness to each observing entity, as well as what time truly means to a human observer. Our sensory inputs are not instantaneous; we are an amalgamation of past experiences, interpolating ahead based on current inputs, experiencing life through a blurred flow, moment by moment.I would not recommend this book for a casual read. However, for those deeply interested in the concept of time, I have yet to come across a book as detailed as this. Personally, I anticipate requiring a second read to fully digest its complex topics.
Gabriel Moises –
Carlo Rovelli ademas de ser un fÃsico que trabaja en lo mas avanzado de la ciencia, es un filósofo y un estudioso del arte y de la historia.Sus obras cientÃficas son una delicia para la mente, pues están salpicadas de referencias al arte, a la belleza, a la historia y a la filosofÃa.Puedes aprender sobre las teorÃas de mas avanzadas de la fÃsica disfrutando la prosa amena de este genio.Cuando termines su lectura pensarás que este libro era muy breve y que se terminó como un bocado del mas delicioso pastel.
Thiago Dalfovo –
Carlo has a way with words. Amazing book: Interesting and easy to follow.
Lucio –
Questo è un testo affascinante, scritto in maniera semplice ma molto profondo.
Susan Stepney –
In his previous book, Reality Is Not What It Seems, Rovelli emphasises the need to remove the Newtonian model of a separately existing time from physical theories. In this new similarly slim and equally lucid volume, he delves deeper into what is this time thing, anyway.He carefully picks apart the many different models of time in physics. Newtonian time has been replaced by many different models of time, all of which remove one or more âobviousâ properties. Special relativistic time depends on your speed, and asking what is now somewhere else âis like asking âWhat is here, in Peking?ââ[p.37]: the present is defined just in a local bubble whose size depends on our precision. General relativistic time depends on the curvature of space, and so is different everywhere, and things fall because âthe movement of things inclines to where time passes more slowlyâ [p.12]. Thermodynamics is the only basic physical theory that has an âarrowâ of time, of entropy increase, the existence of which depends on your scale; that âentropy exists because we describe the world in a blurred fashionâ, and if we âobserve the microscopic state of things the difference between past and future vanishesâ [p.30]. Quantum mechanical (space)time is not continuous, but granular, as is everything else, and different times can coexist in superpositions.Rovelli provides an interesting historical perspective on our current everyday intuitions of it being the same time in different places, and time always passing at the same speed: we didnât always have these ideas. Clocks didnât start started regulating our hours until around the 14th century. But these clocks were synchronised to local noon, not to each other. Then train timetables in the 19th century required synchronisation across distances. Time zones were invented in 1883, and cities gradually synchronised their clocks with each other. Then, in 1905, Einstein destroyed the idea of universal synchronicity. (I had known Einstein worked in a patent office; I was not aware he dealt specifically with patents related to synchronising clocks!)Another interesting historical perspective: today we are accustomed to the idea the Newtonâs view of an independently flowing absolute time, and think that Leibniz was some maverick suggesting relational time, of time being change. But actually, this view of time being dependent on change was the orthodox Aristotelian view, and it was Newton who was the maverick. We are just nowadays more used to the Newtonian view. Einstein synthesised the Aristotelian and Newtonian views: yes, spacetime is something real, yet it is relative, not absolute.Having spent the first part of the book bringing us up to date with current physics, Rovelli moves into more a speculative realm, a different view of time in terms of change. This is heady stuff. We should think of the world as a network of events, and âthe simple fact that nothing is: that things happen insteadâ [p.85]. In this world there is no time as we currently understand it; instead it is a world in which change is ubiquitous.Rovelli explains how some of the problems we have with this new physics is down to grammar: the human languages we use to talk about the world, with their simple past, present and future tenses, do not fit well with our current view of a more complex structure to physical time. But just because natural language, developed before we knew about this complexity, canât cope, doesnât mean our physical models are wrong: we just have to work harder.Rovelli concludes his discussion with some thoughts on the origins of time: how it might emerge from the underlying granular, complex structure of spacetime events; from a particular blurring (ignorance) of macroscopic state; from non-commutative quantum operations imposing a natural (partial) order; from the fact that we have a point of view observing the universe while situated within it.This is a beautifully written book, explaining complex concepts with great clarity and style. It is a translation. There is an amusing translation error on p193, which talks of âa degree of libertyâ: after a moment of thought, I decided that this should be âa degree of freedomâ. Despite the bookâs slimness, there is a great deal to think about here; I have merely scraped the surface in my summary above. It is a wonderfully rich concoction of deep ideas and lucid explanation. Recommended.