The Book Depository The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
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Price: £20.00
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Description: The Order of Time : Hardback : Penguin Putnam Inc : 9780735216105 : 073521610X : 08 May 2018 : First published in Italy by Aldephi Edizioni SPA under the title L'ordine del tempo, 2017--Copyright page. The Book Depository The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780735216105
MPN: 073521610X
GTIN: 9780735216105
Author: Serghiou Const
Rating: 5
Review: Carlo Rovelli is a charismatic writer; in his popular science writing he has the ability to present simply, intrinsically arcane concepts in a prose that is lyrical. In the present book he deconstructs the widely held concept of time in a broadly accepted science and from the barren landscape, he proposes a plausible reconstruction which, however, far from being accepted is, in fact, hotly debated. Our familiar image of time is something that flows uniformly and equally throughout the universe, in the course of which all things happen. With the idea that there exists throughout the cosmos a present that constitutes reality. The past for everyone is fixed having already happened. The future is open, yet to be determined. Reality flows from the past through the present towards the future and the evolution of things between past and future is intrinsically asymmetrical. This was the prevailing thinking regarding the basic structure of the world. The familiar picture has fallen apart, has shown itself to be only an approximation of a much more complex reality. A present that is common throughout the whole universe does not exist. Events are not ordered in pasts, presents, and futures; they are only 'partially' ordered. There is a present that is near to us, but nothing that is 'present' in a far-off galaxy. The present is a localized rather than a global phenomenon. Locally, time passes at different speeds according to where we are and at what speed, we, ourselves are moving. The closer we are to a mass, or the faster we move, the more time slows down: there is no single duration between two events; there are many possible ones. The rhythms at which time flows are determined by the gravitational field, a real entity with its own dynamic that is described in the equations of Einstein. If we overlook quantum effects, time and space are aspects of a great jelly in which we are immersed. But the world is a quantum one, and gelatinous space -time is also an approximation. In the elementary grammar of the world, there is neither space nor time - only processes that transform physical quantities from one to another, from which it is feasible to calculate possibilities and relations. At the most fundamental level that we currently know of, there is no 'time' variable, there is no difference between past and future, there is no space - time. We know how to write equations that describe the world. In these equations, the variables evolve with respect to each other. It is not a 'static' world where all change is illusory: on the contrary, ours, is a world of events rather than of things. The preceding was the deconstruction of time, a universe without time. The reconstruction of time is an attempt to understand how, from this world without time, it is possible for our perception of time to emerge. The surprise has been that, in the emergence of familiar aspects of time, we, ourselves have had a role to play. From our perspective - the perspective of creatures who make up a small part of the world - we see that world flowing in time. Our interaction with the world is partial, which is why we see it in a blurred way. The ignorance that follows from this determines the existence of a particular variable - thermal time - and an entropy that quantifies our uncertainty. It is possible that we belong to a particular subset of the world that interacts with a small number of variables in a small subset of the universe in such a way that the entropy is lower in one direction of our thermal time. The directionality of time is, therefore, real but perspectival: the entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time. We see the occurrence of things ordered in this variable, which we simply call 'time', and the growth of entropy distinguishes the past from the future for us and leads us to the unfolding of the cosmos. It determines the existence of traces, residues and memories of the past. We, human beings, are an effect of this great history of the increase of entropy held together by the memory that is enabled by these traces. Each one of us is a unified being because we reflect the world, because we have formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because it is a perspective on the world unified by memory. From this comes what we call the 'flowing' of time. This is what we are listening to when we listen to the passing of time.
Author: Mr NA Cooper
Rating: 3
Review: I have to say I was disappointed with this book. Being a fan of the subject matter and having read a number of books on the topic I was excited to read this given the glowing press it tends to receive. Unfortunately, having read this and Rovelli's much shorter 7 Brief Lessons in Physics, I have come to the conclusion that his writing style is just not for me. I don't really know if it just the way in which he writes with such flowery language or if this is more to do with it being translated from Italian but I found it difficult to follow at times. Whilst I realise that the topic itself is challenging and not exactly the most straightforward to get your head around, I found his writing a lot more difficult to understand and digest than others, often having to re-read sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs just to get to grips with exactly what he was saying. Not only that but I felt the book kept promising more and never really getting round to delivering on it. Ultimately by the time I had finished, I felt unfulfilled by it. Others may enjoy his less direct and generally more elaborate way of writing, I mainly just found it verbose and more difficult to digest, which, given the complexity of the subject matter, I feel is a real problem.
