"There is no box that can contain this book. On each page lies a collage of poetry, loop quantum gravity, and passages such as:
'I am my mother’s caresses . . . I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind . . . If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.'
Existential, conceptually profound, delicately woven, The Order of Time is the most mind-boggling and deeply moving reflection on physics I’ve encountered; it is star-gazing with Carlo Rovelli as your guide—as nostalgic and poetic as the stars should be."
Publisher Riverhead Books
Publication Date 2018-05-08
Section New Hardcover - Nonfiction / Physics / Chemistry / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Kate B.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780735216105
From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, a concise, elegant exploration of time.
Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to "flow"? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike.
For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe.
Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.
