'The Order of Time' by Carlo Rovelli

 

I was gifted this book by an anonymous benefactor, which just makes it an even more wonderful experience, starting from a high bar.

I had already read 'Heligoland', by the same author, which explains quantum mechanics for dummies. I had to read it three times, so I believe their bar was set pretty high already. 

The thing that strikes you about Rovelli's writing is that it is so good, poetic even, and this is not because he is a non-specialist helping scientists to explain their work. For over 20 years he has been a professor at the Centre de Physique Théorique de Luminy of Aix-Marseille University. We are just lucky that a genuine expert can write. 

In this book, he wants to explain what physics tells us about time, in the state of understanding which we currently have. The evidence leads in spectacularly weird directions, all of which are so counter to our human understanding of what time is. He is rightly impressed by those such as Einstein, who worked out mathematically that time would slow down as your speed increased. This fact - and I think it now counts as a fact - was confirmed many years after Einstein's death by putting a phenomenally accurate atomic clock on a plane and leaving one on the ground then flying around the world in a commercial airliner. When the clocks were united, the one in the plane had recorded less time, to exactly the degree Einstein had predicted 

clock experiment

There is much more weirdness in coming chapters, I know, such as the fact that objects change the time around them.  We can understand that planets directly affect things through what we think of as gravity (think of how the Earth and the Moon are kept in their dance by this force, and how powerful it must be to prevent their separation), but it is a bit head-scratching for me to realise that they also affect time around them, so that time is literally distorted when you approach a planetary or stellar body. 

But all of this takes me back to another book which I have read and enjoyed recently. It is called 'Being you' by Anil Seth, a British neuroscientist and professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience. He explains what we seem to know about the way our cognition and sense of self works, and it is clear from early on that the way our brains work is to make best guesses at what is going on outside the bone buckets where our thinking takes place. 

And what it clear from Seth's account - and which makes the apparently bizarre leaps of Rovelli's book more digestible, is that of course we make a best guess at what is happening around us, because we do not have the energy,  the interest or even the need to know what is really happening. And our 'blurred' version of time is quite good enough for everyday life, even if the actual experimentally-provable facts about time are so weirdly different. 

So I am delighted to be reading this beautifully-written and mind-expanding work, and when I find the identity of the secret gifter I will say a hearty thank you. And I am glad that I already wrote something about time on this blog, |(On Time )which I can now compare with these strange new facts I am learning.