“Our common understanding, where the future is fundamentally different from the past is inadequate for understanding the nature at large” That common understanding, where time is unique, the same all over the universe and the future is fundamentally different from the past, is adequate for our daily life, but is inadequate for understanding the nature at large. Each of them demolishes one aspect of our common understanding of time. These are facts that have been discovered and confirmed. I describe three of them: first, time passes at different speed depending where you are: you age faster up in the mountains than down by the sea second, the notion of the ‘present’ only makes sense in a bubble around us, there is no ‘present’ objectively defined all over the universe third, the distinction between past and future is only statistical and due to our incomplete knowledge of the world. The first are the big surprises from the physics of the last two centuries. What are some of crucial junctions and turning points? It takes us through the insights of Aristotle, Newton and Einstein and others. Your new book, The Order of Time, describes that detour. The precise time of the clocks is something different from the time of our experience.Īfter a long detour, however, I have indeed ended up thinking that Augustine is basically right: what we call ‘time’ in our everyday life, the time of our experience, has something to do with clocks, but much more to do with what happens in our brain and in our emotions. It grew from the surprise learning that physics shows that our common ideas about time do not work well for the real world, as soon as we study it with more precision. My interest in time didn’t start with Augustine.

‘Time’ is the single most used noun in the English language. The richness of the problem of time is precisely that we can start addressing it from all sorts of places. Where is a good place to begin when thinking about the nature of time? In the Confessions, Augustine suggested that time - at least as we experience it - is nothing other than the tension of consciousness itself. Foreign Policy & International Relations.

The order of time carlo rovelli