The Order of Time

by Carlo Rovelli

In the elementary grammar of the world, there is neither space nor time—only processes that transform physical quantities from one to another, from which it is possible to calculate probabilities and relations (chapter 5). At the most fundamental level that we currently know of, therefore, there is little that resembles time as we experience it. There is no special variable “time,” there is no difference between past and future, there is no spacetime (Part Two). We still know how to write equations that describe the world. In those equations, the variables evolve with respect to each other (chapter 8). It is not a “static” world, or a “block universe” where all change is illusory (chapter 7): on the contrary, ours is a world of events rather than of things (chapter 6).

In the end, therefore, instead of many possible times, we can speak only of a single time: the time of our experience—uniform, universal, and ordered. This is the approximation of an approximation of an approximation of a description of the world made from our particular perspective as human beings who are dependent on the growth of entropy, anchored to the flowing of time. We for whom, as Ecclesiastes126 has it, there is a time to be born and a time to die.

A precious miracle that the infinite play of combinations has unlocked for us, allowing us to exist. We may smile now. We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time—in our finite time—to savoring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence.

Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution. Many animals react instinctively with terror and flight at the approach of a predator. It is a healthy reaction, one that allows them to escape from danger. But it’s a terror that lasts an instant, not something that remains with them constantly. Natural selection has produced these big apes with hypertrophic frontal lobes, with an exaggerated ability to predict the future. It’s a prerogative that’s certainly useful but one that has placed before us a vision of our inevitable death, and this triggers the instinct of terror and flight. Basically, I believe that the fear of death is the result of an accidental and clumsy interference between two distinct evolutionary pressures—the product of bad automatic connections in our brain rather than something that has any use or meaning. Everything has a limited duration, even the human race itself. (“The Earth has lost its youthfulness; it is past, like a happy dream. Now every day brings us closer to destruction, to desert,” as Vyasa has it in the Mahābhārata.129) Fearing the transition, being afraid of death, is like being afraid of reality itself; like being afraid of the sun. Whatever for?