Carlo Rovelli

Harvard Book Store welcomes renowned theoretical physicist CARLO ROVELLI—author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Reality Is Not What It Seems—for a discussion of his latest book, The Order of Time.

About The Order 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.

Praise

“Rovelli, a physicist and one of the founders of loop quantum gravity theory, uses literary, poetical and historical devices to unravel the properties of time, what it means to exist without time and, at the end, how time began.” —Scientific American

“An elegantly concise primer makes theoretical physics intelligible . . . it would be to do a disservice to Rovelli and this stunningly written book, to say that brevity is its main virtue.” —The Times (UK)

“The hours readers spend with Rovelli will forever transform their understanding of time . . . Rovelli ushers astonished readers into the quantum wonderland . . . A profound intellectual inquiry.” —Booklist (starred review)