This concept serves us well on our little planet and at the leisurely pace that we, as macroscopic objects, live - but it is wrong. We experience time as something that ticks by steadily, as something that can be divided up into slots and dedicated to different tasks, as something fleeting and directional. The Order of Time is a guide to time as physicists understand it today: how discoveries have washed away the familiar notion of clock time and how physicists have been rebuilding the concept of time ever since. He is best known to non-academics for his previous book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, which takes the reader on a similarly elegant and accessible approach to introducing the weirdness of modern physics.Īnd if there’s one thing you’ll be thinking at the end of The Order of the Time (Penguin, £12.99, ISBN 9780735216105) it may well be: “Modern physics is weird”. Its author, Carlo Rovelli, is a founder of the theory of loop quantum gravity: a theory which unifies gravity and quantum physics in a common framework. What makes The Order of Time stand out is its brevity and its unapologetically poetic style. There is a growing mountain of well-written popular science books exploring particles, parallel universes and everything in between, often penned by renowned physicists. It’s a great time to be a non-physicist who enjoys a spot of string theory or thermodynamics in their spare time.
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