
The Order of Time

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.
Carlo Rovelli • The Order of Time
The growth of entropy is nothing other than the ubiquitous and familiar natural increase of disorder.
Carlo Rovelli • The Order of Time
Our “present” does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us.
Carlo Rovelli • The Order of Time
I watch a film that shows a ball rolling, I cannot tell if the film is being projected correctly or in reverse. But if the ball stops, I know that it is being run properly; run backward, it would show an implausible event: a ball starting to move by itself. The ball’s slowing down and coming to rest are due to friction, and friction produces heat.
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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.
Carlo Rovelli • The Order of Time
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.
Carlo Rovelli • The Order of Time
The notion of “particularity” is born only at the moment we begin to see the universe in a blurred and approximate way.
Carlo Rovelli • The Order of Time
Time has lost its first aspect or layer: its unity. It has a different rhythm in every different place and passes here differently from there. The things of this world interweave dances made to different rhythms. If the world is upheld by the dancing Shiva, there must be ten thousand such dancing Shivas, like the dancing figures painted by Matisse.
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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.