The order of time

The Order of Time (2017), by Carlo Rovelli (Read between June and July, 2023, mostly in Wales).

I read Stephen Hawking‘s A Brief History of Time when I was still in school and, while the book was clearly aimed at a wide market and certainly did not contain any extremely difficult mathematical deductions, I couldn’t get much from it. Age was definitely part of it, and I don’t think I would understand it significantly better now, after going through a couple of Engineering-level Physics course during my undergraduate years – in fact, I think I did try to go back to it a couple of times, and my understanding was not significantly better than before.

There’s the issue of my intellectual limitations, of course, but I also think there is a larger problem: these are complicated subjects. At its highest level, physics is not only being used to explain the peculiarities of movement. It is attempting to understand the origin – and destination – of the universe. There are of course complex mathematical tools being used to analyse this problem, and they are very likely outside the scope of common knowledge. But the conclusions that these tools yield affect the very understanding of everything we know.

The Order of Time analyses this problem from the non-technical angle as well. Differently from Hawking’s book, however, the focus is on the philosophical perspective of the current understanding of time. The book engages with our imaginations by explaining the quest for understanding time, its consequences for our daily lives, and the implications that the meaning of time has for humans, both as individuals and as people who search for meaning when querying about these matters. Rovelli challenges even the idea that time is something that passes or flows equally for everyone – that a minute is the same unit of measure for every observer –, as well as the notion of a well-defined past or future. The present itself, that instant that never is, does not actually exist in a world that we perceived as blurred by our own perceptions. Here I am reminded of that great poem by Nicanor Parra that says: “The present doesn’t exist / Except as it edges past / And is consumed / like youth”.

This is an incredibly imaginative book, very philosophic and poetic. It is one of the few books I can recall that left me thinking about the meaning of my existence. Oh, and there are several references to pop culture for the mass market. For example, the book include a clever interpretation of the lyrics of “The Fool on the Hill” by The Beatles.

Top shelf stuff.