Only by looking at the world as wildly complex networks of events can we understand it. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.”Įven we humans are events multitudes of events in which air, food, water, information and culture is consumed, transformed and emitted. A stone is a prototypical ‘thing’: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. “The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, events have a limited duration. “The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events,” Rovelli writes. Perhaps most challenging is the idea that we – or at least physicists – need to stop thinking of the universe as being full of ‘things’. Although this short book could easily be read in a single sitting, you may well find yourself needing to re-read pages and take short head-scratching breaks as you deal with the implications of what Rovelli has shared. This is what Rovelli tackles in the second part of his book as time is rebuilt as something alien to non-physicists (and probably most physicists, too). The division between past and future only arises due to our unique perspective of the universe. Time is experienced differently for different people. The revelations contained just in the first half of The Order of Time may sound shocking, but told in Rovelli’s clear-headed style, they make perfect sense. This concept serves us well on our little planet and at the leisurely pace that we, as macroscopic objects, live - but it is wrong. We experience time as something that ticks by steadily, as something that can be divided up into slots and dedicated to different tasks, as something fleeting and directional. The Order of Time is a guide to time as physicists understand it today: how discoveries have washed away the familiar notion of clock time and how physicists have been rebuilding the concept of time ever since. He is best known to non-academics for his previous book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, which takes the reader on a similarly elegant and accessible approach to introducing the weirdness of modern physics.Īnd if there’s one thing you’ll be thinking at the end of The Order of the Time (Penguin, £12.99, ISBN 9780735216105) it may well be: “Modern physics is weird”. Its author, Carlo Rovelli, is a founder of the theory of loop quantum gravity: a theory which unifies gravity and quantum physics in a common framework. What makes The Order of Time stand out is its brevity and its unapologetically poetic style. There is a growing mountain of well-written popular science books exploring particles, parallel universes and everything in between, often penned by renowned physicists. It’s a great time to be a non-physicist who enjoys a spot of string theory or thermodynamics in their spare time.
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