The Order of Time

by Carlo Rovelli

We cannot draw a complete map, a complete geometry, of everything that happens in the world, because such happenings—including among them the passage of time—are always triggered only by an interaction with, and with respect to, a physical system involved in the interaction.

The time of physics is, ultimately, the expression of our ignorance of the world.

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

We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward predicting events in the future, toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this immense, chaotic universe.

When we cannot formulate a problem with precision, it is often not because the problem is profound: it’s because the problem is false.

“The silver thread is broken, the golden bowl is shattered, the amphora at the fountain breaks, the bucket falls into the well, the earth returns to dust.”