Book Report October 2023
Plenty of “time” this month
Carlo Rovelli (2018). The Order of Time. [Audible] Narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch. Penguin Audio.
“People assume time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff” (David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor in “Blink,” Doctor Who, third series, episode 10. Written by Steven Moffat.)
This book is a mind-bending exploration of the nature of time. Is time a construct to measure the intersections of events? Do the past, present, and future all exist equally? Is time faster in some places than others? Is time experienced phenomenologically or physically?
The book tries to be both science and philosophy, and I’m not convinced it succeeds. There are some thought-provoking, poetic quotes scattered throughout the text, and when spoken by Benedict Cumberbatch, they become magical, even if they are ultimately meaningless.
“We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward…
