The Order of Time

by Carlo Rovelli

The return journey has been the attempt to understand how, from this world without time, it is possible for our perception of time to emerge (chapter 9). The surprise has been that, in the emergence of familiar aspects of time, we ourselves have had a role to play. From our perspective—the perspective of creatures who make up a small part of the world—we see that world flowing in time. Our interaction with the world is partial, which is why we see it in a blurred way. To this blurring is added quantum indeterminacy. The ignorance that follows from this determines the existence of a particular variable—thermal time (chapter 9)—and of an entropy that quantifies our uncertainty.