The Order of Time

I picked up this book hoping to gain new insights on the belief (one that I take sides with) that time isn't a dimension, that it isn't something we traverse on, especially not in a commutative manner (i.e. time travel). Carlo Rovelli accomplishes this with his equally poetic and mathematical narrative, but not before taking me on a journey of existential romanticizing, confusion, doubt, bewilderment and sympathy, in this order.

There were some radical jumps in the definition of time which went from independent entity → human construct → gravitational field that is both subjective and independent of perception (Einstein's resolution of Aristotle time and Newtonian time) → emotions. By this point Carlo has explained elegantly the mathematics of his new notion of time and succumbs to an elegy of the beauty of all its implications.

The parts where I felt least convinced were some analogies that I felt were weak (e.g. mixing of all things = growing count of disordered configurations = collapsing mountain = crumbling structure) and similarly how some concepts were interpreted (e.g. “The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration.” - the logic would have been more elegant if he had instead said “events create time”) though this could also be a liability of translation as it is originally in Italian.

I had expected something along the lines of a rationalization of the belief that time is artificial, that it is nothing but a human invention necessitated by our need for organization, to map out what we learn and understand and operate with, and that which is constructed around the regularity of phenomena (e.g. day-night cycle). While the book does lend affirmation to this, it also introduces a completely new and mind-blowing concept. The concept is a set of concepts, and because it's unintuitive and unobservable by human senses, it's naturally not easy to maintain in one's thought process (especially because he somehow uses the word “time” in colloquial phrases that contradict what he has revealed - though it could be because he is limited by conservative language, we have yet to develop the language that more accurately expresses the seemingly abstract concepts of quantum physics), thus requiring some muscle memory to be built which you will realize after it's been referred to enough times throughout the chapters. The concept needs to be learned as if learning a new grammar, but Carlo writes his book in a way that makes this easy for the reader with a kind of spaced repetition of the unfamiliar terms (or their contexts). This is the first reason why I think he is just the right spokesperson for such disruptive concepts of quantum physics.

The second reason is that by the third chapter he circles back to justifying why we perceive time the way we do despite the disruptive nature of the novel theory. This saves the readers from falling into a pit of existential dread, some possible dissociation, alarm, or even blunt rejection of the new notion of time. What the book guarantees though is a complete upheaval of perspective, and you walk away with new questions to brew, or new sensibilities to nurture.

The third reason is he writes the book for a broad audience, while still satisfying the more inquisitive readers with superscripts and optional technical chapters (he gives permission to skip two chapters but I think it's worth the pain of sludging through as a non-technical reader).

In the last section ‘Sister of Sleep' he goes off on a more personal soliloquy, waltzing us along a personal stage of his thoughts, revealing his sentiments on the finality of his life, of his experience of time and that now he is ready for death, having already “drunk deep of the bittersweet contents of this chalice.”