> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://log.desipundit.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Order of Time ★★★★☆ - URL: https://log.desipundit.com/the-order-of-time/ - Published: 2026-09-25T22:27:31.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-25T22:48:22.000Z - Author: PM - Tags: Books This book altered my view of a topic I believed I understood. It is a more approachable version of Hawking's A Brief History of Time, and Rovelli manages to make complex physics understandable for most of the book. I already knew that time slows down when speed increases. Yet, I was unaware that time also varies with location. Rovelli states that proper time depends on your distance from mass and your speed. This results in the conclusion that there is no single, shared present. The idea of "now" becomes a localized bubble around an individual rather than a universal constant. Rovelli offers a comprehensive history of these concepts. He discusses Aristotle's early theories, Newton's framework, and Einstein's later contributions to space-time and entropy. His account of entropy is especially clear. He defines it as the number of microscopic states that human perception cannot differentiate. He further explains that the distinction between past and future is not a basic law of nature. It emerges only in heat-related systems where entropy started low. This description helped me understand why time seems to flow in only one direction. The author presents his own field, loop quantum gravity, and tells the reader that two chapters are technical. That warning proved accurate. I had to read several sections more than once to follow his reasoning, which slowed the reading experience. The book extends beyond a typical physics lecture by linking these ideas to identity and consciousness. Rovelli addresses these subjects with notable emotion. In one section, he discusses grief and argues that the pain of loss is valuable because it comes from love. The book is slow and challenging at times, but it is worth the time it takes to read. PS: I do not fully understand loop quantum gravity. I don't think that was the book's primary aim. --- ## Edition Read - **Edition Type:** Ebook - **Date First Published:** May 25, 2017 - **Publisher:** Penguin - **ISBN10:** 0525626077 - **ASIN:** 0525626077 - **Language:** English ## Description > 4 Hours and 30 Minutes > > A concise, elegant exploration of time from the author of the international bestseller Seven Brief Lessons on Physics > > 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 listeners this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it appears. 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. *Source:* [GoodReads](https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn/0525626077?ref=log.desipundit.com) --- ## Notable Highlights > “This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.” > “Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.” > “We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes...” > “I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.” > “We understand the world in its becoming, not in its being.” > “It is like the point where the rainbow touches the forest. We think that we can see it > “The ability to understand something before it’s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.” > “All of the sons of Adam are part of one single body, They are of the same essence. When time afflicts us with pain In one part of that body All the other parts feel it too. If you fail to feel the pain of others You do not deserve the name of man.” > “I remember a little girl...But how can that be...Once I was that little Resi,and then one day I became an old woman?...If God wills it so, why allow me to see it?Why doesn't he hide it from me?Everything is a mystery, such a deep mystery...I feel the fragility of things in time.From the bottom of my heart, I feel we shouldcling to nothing.Everything slips through our fingers.All that we seek to hold on to dissolves.Everything vanishes, like mist and dreams...Time is a strange thing.When we don't need it, it is nothing.Then, suddenly, there is nothing else.It is everywhere around us. Also within us.It seeps into our faces.It seeps into the mirror, runs through my temples...Between you and I it runs silently, like an hourglass.Oh, Quin Quin.Sometimes I feel it flowing inexorably.Sometimes I get up in the middle of the nightand stop all the clocks...” > “As human beings, we live by emotions and thoughts. We exchange them when we are in the same place at the same time, talking to each other, looking into each other's eyes, brushing against each other's skin. We are nourished by this network of encounters and exchanges. But, in reality, we do not need to be in the same place and time to have such exchanges. Thoughts and emotions that create bonds of attachment between us have no difficulty in crossing seas and decades, sometimes even centuries, tied to thin sheets of paper or dancing between the microchips of a computer. We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread. This book is also a part of that weave...” > “But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is, in the end, something good and even beautiful, because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.” > “This is the disconcerting conclusion that emerges from Boltzmann’s work: the difference between the past and the future refers only to our own blurred vision of the world. It’s a conclusion that leaves us flabbergasted: is it really possible that a perception so vivid, basic, existential > “Past and future are different from each other. Cause precedes effect. Pain comes after a wound, not before it. The glass shatters into a thousand pieces, and the pieces do not re-form into a glass. We cannot change the past; we can have regrets, remorse, memories. The future instead is uncertainty, desire, anxiety, open space, destiny, perhaps. We can live toward it, shape it, because it does not yet exist. Everything is still possible... Time is not a line with two equal directions: it is an arrow with different extremities.” > “Before Newton, time for humanity was the way of counting how things changed. Before him, no one had thought it possible that a time independent of things could exist. Don't take your intuitions and ideas to be 'natural': they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.” *These are popular quotes sourced from Goodreads readers.*