The Order of Time

by Carlo Rovelli

Rebellion is perhaps among the deepest roots of science: the refusal to accept the present order of things.

Perhaps poetry is another of science’s deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the visible.

This tumult stirs up everything. If one section of the molecules is still, it becomes stirred up by the frenzy of neighboring ones that set them in motion, too: the agitation spreads, the molecules bump into and shove each other.

Why, in the past, was entropy lower?

Will things just get WHACKIER as time goes on because uhhhh

Time is elastic in our personal experience of it.

When Robespierre freed France from monarchy, Europe’s ancien régime feared that the end of civilization itself was nigh. When the young seek to liberate themselves from an old order of things, the old are afraid that all will founder. But Europe was able to survive perfectly well, even without the king of France. The world will go on turning, even without King Time.

We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being. “Things” in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous.58 But only before returning to dust. Because sooner or later, obviously, everything returns to dust.

We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread.

The entire universe is like a mountain that collapses in slow motion. Like a structure that very gradually crumbles.

The first image that I have of myself as a child is the child that my mother sees. We are for ourselves in large measure what we see and have seen of ourselves reflected back to us by our friends, our loves, and our enemies.

we are the reflection of the idea of ourselves that we receive back from our kind.

I am this long, ongoing novel.

We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time.

The directionality of time is therefore real but perspectival (chapter 10): the entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.

Each one of us is a unified being because we reflect the world, because we have formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because it is a perspective on the world unified by memory (chapter 12). From this comes what we call the “flowing” of time. This is what we are listening to when we listen to the passing of time.

What is entirely credible, in any case, is the general fact that the temporal structure of the world is different from the naïve image that we have of it. This naïve image is suitable for our daily life, but it’s not suitable for understanding the world in its minute folds, or in its vastness.

I would not wish to live as if I were immortal. I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less so now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me.

The choice is between forcing the description of the world so that it adapts to our intuition, or learning instead to adapt our intuition to what we have discovered about the world. I have few doubts that the second strategy is the most fruitful one.