Because you’ve never seen such a sequence of events in the real world. But, if you were to watch a film in which shards of pottery scattered about on the floor suddenly rushed together and formed a teapot, which then jumped up to land on a table, you would interpret that film as being played backward in time. If you see a film of a teapot first sitting on the edge of a table, then falling off the table and shattering into a thousand shards, the film appears perfectly normal. And both the writing and vocal delivery are beautiful.
Thus the entire concept of “now” needs rethinking.Ĭhapter by chapter, Rovelli shows how modern physics has annihilated common understandings of time. The final insult: Two events that are simultaneous to one person are not for another person who is in motion with respect to the first. Later, Einstein conjectured, with a highly mathematical theory called general relativity, that gravity also affects the rate of ticking of clocks: A clock in strong gravity ticks more slowly than one in weak gravity. That seemingly absurd proposition has been proved. In the process, he proposed that identical clocks in motion relative to each other do not tick at the same rate. In 1905, at age 26, Einstein first set out to explain the workings of electricity and magnetism. The idea was so obvious as not to be questioned - until it was. Time flowed in lock-step uniformity everywhere throughout the universe. A second was a second was a second, period.
Prior to Einstein, it was believed that time was absolute. Meanwhile, he always returns to us frail human beings - we who struggle to understand not only the external world of atoms and galaxies but also the internal world of our hearts and our minds. “A gentle letter, alluding to the spiritual bond between Michele and Albert.” That sensitivity to the human condition is a constant presence in Rovelli’s book - a book that reviews all of the best scientific thinking about the perennial mystery of time, from relativity to quantum physics to the inexorable second law of thermodynamics. “It’s a letter written to console a grieving sister,” he writes. But then the author goes on to say that the great physicist was addressing his letter not to scientists or philosophers, but to a bereft family. That means nothing… The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Rovelli comments that Einstein was taking great poetic license with the temporal findings of his relativity theory, even to the point of error. There’s a passage in Carlo Rovelli’s lovely new book, “The Order of Time” - a letter from Einstein to the family of his recently deceased friend Michele Besso: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. THE ORDER OF TIME By Carlo Rovelli Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell Read by Benedict Cumberbatch 4 hours, 19 minutes.
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