read this to convince myself of my youth, ended this thinking that i’m ageless. i’m grateful i will never perceive a world without time—i wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. our perspective is a defense mechanism to preserve our sanity. Dr. Rovelli is the rarest combination of poet and physicist: a true time-traitor seurat-splintered proust-parsing rilke-reading renaissance man. at times I forgot this was non-fiction instead of myth because his words were pure poetry. some of theoretical physics definitely went in one eye and out the other, shortcircuiting the neurons in my brain entirely, but i’ve retained beauty, awe, and an expanding sense of what i don’t know. not too shabby for someone who always dreaded rolling balls down sloped ramps in GCSE physics lab. some intuition-defying concepts I encountered: the illusion of “now,” granularity (time is not continuous), indeterminacy (cause & effect can co-occur), entropy is a relative quantity, recurrence theorem (not mentioned in this book but a podcast) quotes: <i>“if the world is upheld by the dancing Shiva, there must be ten thousand such dancing Shivas, like the dancing figures painted by Matisse…” “If more gently than Orpheus who moved even the trees you were to pluck the zither the lifeblood would not return to the vain shadow… Harsh fate, but its burden becomes lighter to bear, since everything that attempts to turn back is impossible.” “perhaps poetry is another of science’s deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the visible.” “gradually, time slips from the hands of the angels and into those of the mathematicians” “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.” “If by “time” we mean nothing more than happening, then everything is time. There is only that which exists in time.” “the world without time is a net of interconnected events, where the variables in play adhere to probabilistic rules that, incredibly, we know for a good part how to write. and it’s a clear world, windswept and full of beauty as the crests of mountains; aridly beautiful as the cracked lips of the adolescent you loved.” “temporality is profoundly linked to blurring. the blurring is due to the fact that we are ignorant of the miscroscopic details of the world. the time of physics is, ultimately the expression of our ignorance of the world. time is ignorance.” “in it's anxious pursuit of objectivity science must not forget that our experience of the world comes from within. point of view is an ingredient and every description of the observable world that we make. the world that we have been given is the world seen from within it, not from without.” “the entire coming into being of the cosmos as a gradual process of disordering.” “The history of the happening of the world itself can only be an an effect of perspective, like the turning of the heavens; an effect of our particular point of view in the world…Inexorably, then, the study of time does nothing but return us to ourselves.” “time is the time of mankind” “What causes us to suffer is not in the past, or the future does here now in our memory, in our expectations. we long for timelessness. we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. time is suffering. We are being made of time. that to which we owe are being giving us the precious gift of our very existence, allowing us to create the fleeting illusion of permanence that is the origin of all are suffering.”. “This is the approximation of an approximation of an approximation of a description of the world made from our particular perspective, as human beings who were dependent on the growth of entropy, anchored to the flowing of time.” “perhaps the emotion of time is precisely what time is for us, and we began to see that we are time. we are the space is clearing opened by the traces of memory, inside the connections between our neurons. we are memory. we are in nostalgia. we are longing for a future that will not come.”</i>
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