Time is a figment of our collective imagination
Carlo Rovelli made my brain explode
Carlo Rovelli has created a wonderful piece of art in “The Order of Time”. He has shown us how time doesn’t exist, and in the slipstream of that, how to write a beautiful, smart and intelligible book about quantum physics and philosophy. Hold on to your socks.
A book review in five lines
An amazing read, deconstructing a concept that we are intimately familiar with. Showing how our deeply ingrained understanding and experience of time is completely wrong. Beautiful, erudite yet simple prose. Understandable and fun to read sentences and passages explaining some of the most bizarre and counterintuitive revelations from quantum physics experiments.
How to deconstruct time and blow minds
First, Rovelli shows us in a very literal sense the relativity of time, proving there is no one time, but in stead many different times. Time moves at different paces for me than it does for my auntie who lives in the mountains.
Then he proceeds to disprove the existence of a direction in time — the future may, at times, very well come before the past or the present. Rovelli then goes on to prove that there is no time like the present, literally — there’s no such thing as a point in time that we can denote as ‘the present’ that has any basis in reality.
There is only arbitrary rhythm
Time does not exist: in a swirling, completely chaotic universe where everything is coming into existence and leaving existence, there is only rhythm. The rhythm of patterns of movement and change that occur in a loop — like a vortex in the middle of an ocean of chaos, is all there is.
And it is, in the end, our own minds that decide what combination of events constitute a pattern. To a two-year-old, a Van Gogh painting might be chaos. A marine zoologist could see the patterns of movement in a shoal of fish, where you and I may just see a lot of sardines shooting back and forth.
What time tells us about ourselves
Our brains probably evolved to become really good prediction machines. To do that, first our brain — or more generally, intelligence on planet earth- would have to be able to decide what patterns of events were meaningful to our survival.
It is us that need patterns to be more meaningful than other, from an absolute standing point equally meaningful or equally random and meaningless combinations of events. That way, if a pattern occurs more than once, in a certain rhythm, we can start to predict it and align our actions with our desired outcome. And that’s why and how we invented time.
Surprise: humans are extremely good at holding on to mental constructs they made up by themselves. Go read this book. If you dare.
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