The Order of Time

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.

Continuity is only a mathematical technique for approximating very finely grained things. The world is subtly discrete, not continuous. The good Lord has not drawn the world with continuous lines: with a light hand, he has sketched it in dots, like the painter Georges Seurat.

It is not possible to think of duration as continuous. We must think of it as discontinuous: not as something that flows uniformly but as something that in a certain sense jumps, kangaroo-like, from one value to another.

Don’t take your intuitions and ideas to be “natural”: they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.

Our “present” does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us.

There is no special moment on Proxima b that corresponds to what constitutes the present here and now.

The notion of “particularity” is born only at the moment we begin to see the universe in a blurred and approximate way.

The growth of entropy is nothing other than the ubiquitous and familiar natural increase of disorder.

The difference between past and future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention . . . in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.