‘The Order of Time’: On the Mind-Boggling, Paradoxical Character of Time
A review of ‘The Order of Time’, by Carlo Rovelli; Allen Lane, 2018.
‘Time’, Auden tells us, is ‘intolerant / Of the brave and innocent, / And indifferent in a week / To a beautiful physique.’ It is also mind-bogglingly paradoxical, probably illusory and — if I can say this — a very human, and very beautiful idea. This is what Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist and writer, sets out in his fascinating book on the subject, The Order of Time.
Time, Rovelli tells us, is neither fixed nor universal. We are not all sharing in a universal ‘now’. Time changes; and how it changes rests on where we are and how fast we are moving. Time will pass more slowly near to a massive object, like a planet. It will pass more quickly at a great height, where gravity is weaker than it is on the ground. It is relative, not absolute: emerging from the laws of physics. It follows that time does not flow in a straight line; it is more like a jumbled ball of thread. Past, present, future — these are only conceptually solid, terms we have created to help us grasp and manipulate the world.
Time does not flow in a straight line; it is more like a jumbled ball of thread.
For what we perceive as the passage of time is only the transfer of energy. When energy flows from one part of a system to another, we observe an unfolding. Consider a tree. A tree captures energy from sunlight and turns it into a different kind of energy that is store in sugars. The tree uses this energy to build new cells, transport nutrients, and maintain its structure, which manifests as growth and repair. Due to the second law of thermodynamics—which describes how in any natural process, disorder, randomness or uncertainty (entropy) increases over time—the tree’s system becomes less organised. Some energy is lost; much of it is converted or distributed less efficiently. It ages. It is less able to repair itself from damage done by weather, for instance, or disease.
Time, then, does not act on the world (as Auden, for poetic reasons, describes). It has no agency. It does not, in any fundamental sense, exist. It is an idea that describes the process of energy transfer everywhere. But that does mean we are in some way ‘wrong’ to think of time as we do. We live in a world of facts and meanings: the Mona Lisa is both pigment on canvas and the face of a woman with just a hint of a smile. To dismiss meanings for the sake of facts is to succumb to a misunderstanding. It would be to say that we are merely clever monkeys, doomed to be blown about by the winds of fate, not human persons bestowed with freedom and bound by the moral law.
Rovelli’s great challenge is trying to make all this easy to understand for the curious non-specialist. Trying to grapple with quantum physics can be like trying to catch smoke: it is so wonderfully counter-intuitive that it is no surprise, in my view, that out of all the winners of the Nobel Prize since the awards began, physicists by far make up the smallest number of atheists. Often, to read a book like this one requires the reader to suspend her everyday knowledge and open herself up to the purely abstract. It probably will not ‘make sense’ in the way we commonly use that phrase. But I think Rovelli does a fine job of making all this stuff comprehensible.
Trying to grapple with quantum physics can be like trying to catch smoke: it is so wonderfully counter-intuitive.
It helps, I think, that he knows his subject so fantastically well and that he has a sense of romance. Iain McGilchrist has said that, in his experience, physicists are far more open-minded than, say, biologists, and very much at home with mystery and metaphor, which is a precondition, really, of understanding and appreciating poetry, religion and that which lies beyond language. This shows. We also have the sense while reading The Order of Time that Rovelli wants to involve us, which is one of the hallmarks of a good writer. He is not condescending to us or simply relaying information to us, as a (mediocre) teacher might. He is holding out his hand to us and inviting us to come on a journey.
In the end, The Order of Time is a thorough and occasionally quite poetic and philosophical study of a mind-bending subject and what, to my mind, is an endlessly fascinating concept. Not for nothing has it fascinated human beings for as long as there have been human beings: it is bound up with what it means to be human. For Eliot, ‘all time is unredeemable’—it cannot be separated from our lives nor can it be changed or recovered once it has passed. Time is the vital ground of human reality. Punctuated with striking citations from writers and thinkers like Proust, Anaximander and the authors of Ecclesiastes, The Order of Time makes for a lovely tour of this topic, given by a brilliantly enthusiastic tour guide.
