The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
A pop-physics book in which Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli exposes time as being extremely not ordered.
Finished: 31 March 2020
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Never thought Iād see the day where I complained that a book leaned too far into the poetic, but here we are. I liked Part One, which lays out the physics behind why time is not as it seems, but Part Two goes too much into philosophising without much of a sound basis and without adequately laying out the supporting physics. Where Reality Is Not What It Seems took readers through a series of logical steps, provided the appropriate rigour, and created a sound place from which to begin amping up the complexity, The Order of Time begins in science and then swerves the argument into flowery interpretations of thinkers from St Augustine to Kant to Buddha.
His ultimate conclusion seems to be that our experience of time is something that depends on our human lens: something that philosophers have said for centuries (and he quotes those philosophers). In support of this in the physics side of things, he briefly explains the irreversibility of ever-increasing entropy and how the relations between particles are blurred such that we are unable to perceive them. “Therefore, our vision of the world is blurred because the physical interactions between the part of the world to which we belong and the rest are blind to many variables. … This does not mean that blurring is a mental construct; it depends on actual, existing physical interactions.”
He then switches to philosophy and quotes Hans Reichenbach, writing that time causes anxiety; as a result, we have imagined the existence of eternity and heaven and higher realms. And from there he suggests: “Perhaps, ultimately, the emotional dimension of time is not the film of mist that prevents us from apprehending the nature of time objectively. Perhaps the emotion of time is precisely what time is for us.” His foray into the emotions is rooted more in literature and music, which (knowing how poets think) can be hit or miss. My main issue, however, is this. There is a difference between (1) humans being constructed such that we are unable to perceive the reality of time and (2) the emotions that arise from our particular experience of time. Those emotions might well cause us to be attached to time or have an awareness of it that doesn’t match reality. But that’s not the same as saying that, as humans, the structure of our minds and the physical interactions of slice of the universe we occupy are such that we are unable to perceive temporal reality, which is what I took his argument to be. Emotions are far more like a mental construct than the blurring of thermodynamic interactions occurring in the physical world. And what he says about emotions seems to suggest that we refuse to see reality, not that we are unable to (one could imagine a person who wasn’t caught up with anxiety about time and didn’t experience those obscuring emotions). Maybe he wasn’t trying to put forward a serious argument for the place of emotions or maybe I’m reading ungenerously. Perhaps he was simply swept up with the poetry of it all, but that leads to confusion and makes the entire text less credible.
Iām not a physicist and I know this is a pop science book ā emphasis on the pop ā but by the end it was a pop philosophy book sprinkled over with poetry and references to the likes of the Mahabharata, Bach, and the book of Job. The final chapter consists of his musings on what really drives us as human beings ā and I do think it’s all connected and that the final chapter drives at the point that really matters, but he didn’t earn that ending. He didn’t lay out the path correctly and, consequently, his broader conclusions on life feel flimsy. While physics and philosophy certainly have implications for one another, and there is truth also in art and poetry, The Order of Time does not result in a successful mix.