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The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli: book review

 


The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (1959) is about the physics of time and space: ‘We are time. We are this space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We are memory. We are nostalgia. We are longing for a future that will not come.’

 

The book is divided into three parts: 1) The Crumbling of Time, 2) The World without Time, and 3) The Sources of Time. 

 

Part One is an account of modern physics and time – from Anaximander (‘the Earth floats in space’) and Nicolaus Copernicus (‘the Sun is at the centre of the Universe’) to Albert Einstein (‘the equations that describe how proper times develop relative to each other’) and others. 

 

Poets, artists, philosophers, and scientists have all been fascinated by the mystery of time. The more humans develop, the more they transform their understanding of it.  

 

Carlo Rovelli talks of altitude, speed, the midday sun, timezones, Earth’s hemispheres, rhythms, and cycles. He talks about quantum gravity. And why we have clocks. He adds a poem, a song, a quote. 


In Part Two, Carlo Rovelli says that the world is made of events – of happenings, not things. 

 

In Part Three, he discusses revolution, thermal time, and perspective. He recalls the lyrics to the Pete Seeger’s 1959 song Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season) adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes – ‘There is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to weep and a time to dance, a time to kill and a time to heal …’

 

The Order of Time is written in understandable terms with plenty of examples, only one small equation, and lots of diagrams. Carlo Rovelli explains concepts well, and sets time in context and history, enlightening readers with not just science, but also philosophy, literature, and art. Carlo Rovelli places humans as inquisitive beings who are not only in the Universe to experience it, but also to reflect upon themselves and to understand what time means to humankind.








 

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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