Carlo Rovelli - The Order of Time

Rovelli writes as a physicist whose career has largely been researching Loop Quantum Gravity. The Order of Time is his most complete speculation on the nature of time.

For Rovelli, time is a perspective that human have on the world. This perspective is necessarily blurred, which is a key term for him. Given the complexity of all that we can’t see, our perception necessarily simplifies reality into a blurriness that allows us to get on in the world. This blur is the origin of time as our simplified perspective on a world that is made up only of events, not of things.

Rovelli is adamant that we seen the cosmos as a mashup of events without an inherent temporality. “At the fundamental level, the world is a collection of events not ordered in time” (155).

This is an interesting idea that I am sympathetic to. The cosmos is motion all the way down, and there is no reason that we need to resolve motion to the expression of prior natural laws. If we think of time as emerging from motions that begin to collaborate and cooperate in predictable ways, then this view makes complete sense.