The Order of Time

By Carlo Rovelli

Book Overview

One of TIME's Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade

"Meet the new Stephen Hawking . . . The Order of Time is a dazzling book." --The Sunday Times

From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems, Helgoland, and Anaximander comes a concise, elegant exploration 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 073521610X
• ISBN13: 9780735216105
• Release Date: May 2018
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.1" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Incredible

I bought this book from a local bookstore but I came here to give a review. Carlo Rovelli is an incredible writer. Breaks down the topic into books small enough to finish in a day or two, and doesn’t feel like an academic reading assignment. I’ll continue to buy more of his work.