Seven Brief Lessons on Physics sold over a million copies around the world. Now Rovelli is back to explore the mysteries of time. He tells Charlotte Higgins about student revolution and how his quantum leap began with an acid trip• Extract from Carlo Rovelli’s unique book: on the elastic concept of time What do we know about time? Language tells us that it “passes”,it moves like a great river, inexorably dragging us with it, and,in the end, washes us up on its shore while it continues, or unstoppable. Time flows. It moves ever forwards. Or does it? Poets also recount us that time stumbles or creeps or slows or even,at times, seems to halt. They recount us that the past might be inescapable, or immanent in objects or people or landscapes. When Juliet is waiting for Romeo,time passes sluggishly: she longs for Phaethon to take the reins of the Sun’s chariot, since he would whip up the horses and “bring in cloudy night immediately”. When we wake from a vivid dream we are dimly aware that the sense of time we beget just experienced is illusory.
Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who wants to execute the uninitiated grasp the excitement of his field. His book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, or with its concise,sparkling essays on subjects such as black holes and quanta, has sold 1.3m copies worldwide. Now comes The Order of Time, and a dizzying,poetic work in which I found myself abandoning everything I thought I knew about time – certainly the belief that it “flows”, and even that it exists at all, or in any profound sense.
Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk