The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical ‘thing’: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an ‘event’. It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow.

The world is more like Naples than Singapore.

Traces of the past exist, and not traces of the future, only because entropy was low in the past. There can be no other reason, since the only source of the difference between past and future is the low entropy of the past.

It is what philosophers call ‘indexicality’: the characteristic of certain words which have a different meaning every time they are used, a meaning determined by where, how, when and by whom they are being spoken. Words such as ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘I’, ‘this’, ‘tonight’ all assume a different meaning depending on who utters them and the circumstances in

Aristotle was the first to discuss in depth and with acuity the meaning of ‘space’, or ‘place’, and to arrive at a precise definition: the place of a thing is what surrounds that thing.

Aristotle believed that it did. If nothing changes, time does not pass – because time is our way of situating ourselves in relation to the changing of things: the placing of ourselves in relation to the counting of days. Time is the measure of change:8 if nothing changes, there is no time.

On the one hand, there was time, with its many determinations; on the other, the simple fact that nothing is: that things happen instead.

A group of boys on a field decide to have a match. They form teams. This is how we used to do it: the two most enterprising would take turns choosing the players they wanted, having tossed a coin to see who would have first pick. At the end of this solemn procedure, there were two teams. Where were the teams before they were chosen? Nowhere. They e

Sundials, hourglasses and water clocks already existed in the ancient world, in the Mediterranean region and in China – but they did not play the cruel role that clocks have today in the organization of our lives. It is only in the fourteenth century in Europe that people’s lives start to be regulated by mechanical clocks. Cities and villages build