BOOK REVIEW | The Order of Time
- Greg McNeilly
- Apr 29
- 4 min read
📖 Carlo Rovelli, Riverhead Books (2019) | 256p
Some books explain, and some books unmoor. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli does the latter. He is a physicist, yes, but it is not equations that concern him so much as the deeper erosion of what we believe to be stable: past, present, future. He tells us these are illusions, and once said aloud, the room seems to tilt slightly.
Rovelli begins by stripping away the scaffolding. Time, he shows, is not a single river flowing forward but a fragmented, localized phenomenon altered by gravity, speed, and position. Two clocks placed at different altitudes will disagree, and not metaphorically. This is not theory; it is experiment; it is fact.
He writes with a lyrical precision, a controlled vertigo. Augustine appears, Aristotle, ancient names reaching out toward something, Rovelli suggests, we still fail to understand. The references are not ornamental. They are necessary. Because what Rovelli is doing here is not merely explaining physics; he is making visible the slenderness of the world we thought we lived in.
There are moments in The Order of Time when the science buckles, overwhelmed by metaphor, when one suspects that Rovelli, too, is aware of how language strains to bear these ideas. He describes the universe as a network of events, not a place but a weaving — something you cannot quite see all at once. You can feel, reading this, the impulse toward poetry because no prose can quite carry it.
This is not a book for those seeking comfort in certainties. It demands patience, a willingness to sit with the dissonance between what is felt and what is. There is a kind of sorrow at its core, a quiet mourning for the narrative of time we were taught to believe in. And yet, there is also consolation: if time is not what we thought, then what matters is not the order of moments but the richness of the now.
In the end, Rovelli does not offer closure. Instead, he provides stillness, a kind of radical acceptance. The present moment, he writes, is all we ever have, and even that slips from our hands as we reach for it.
The Order of Time is a physics book about the unsettling, beautiful transience of being alive. If the topic appeals, it is highly recommended.
KEY QUOTES
“We do not see time; we see things moving.” p17
“The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.” p23
“Time is ignorance.” p78
“The difference between past and future exists only when there is heat.” p58
“We are not outside of the world; we are part of it.” p123
“The present is not a common universal ‘now.’ It is a local phenomenon.” p51
“We inhabit time as fish live in water.” p65
“Perhaps the emotion of time is precisely what time is for us.” p135
“We are time. We are this space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons.” p157
📚 Outline of The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
Introduction: The Crumbling of Time
• Time, as we experience it, does not exist at the fundamental level of reality.
• Setting the stage: Time is not a simple, universal flow.
Part One: The Loss of Time
(Breaking down how our familiar concept of time dissolves)
1. Time Is Not Uniform
• Time passes differently depending on gravity and velocity.
• Relativity: No single, universal “now.”
2. No Universal “Present”
• Different observers have different “nows.”
• Time is relative to position and speed.
3. The End of Time’s Flow
• At a fundamental quantum level, physics describes interactions, not a flowing timeline.
• The equations of quantum gravity do not contain time.
4. The End of Duration
• Time is an emergent phenomenon — it arises from the relationships between objects.
Part Two: The World Without Time
(Building a picture of reality without traditional time)
5. What Emerges from Time’s Disappearance
• Thermodynamics and entropy explain the “arrow of time.”
• Our sense of past and future is linked to increasing entropy (disorder).
6. The Entropy of the World
• Entropy is not a universal feature but a feature of how we interact with the world.
• The arrow of time depends on our limited perspective.
7. Memory and Heat
• Memory is tied to thermodynamic processes.
• Our experience of time’s flow is rooted in how we record and perceive changes.
8. The Sources of Time
• Time emerges from the perspective of beings like us, who have incomplete information about the world.
• Time is perspectival, like up and down, left and right.
Part Three: The Sources of Time
(Reconstructing a sense of time from human perception)
9. Time as an Approximation
• Time emerges in the large-scale limit of the universe’s behavior.
• At the quantum level, reality is timeless.
10. The Incomplete World
• The complexity and incompleteness of information shape our experience of time.
11. The Perspective of the World
• Time is not an objective feature; it reflects how limited beings (like us) interact with the universe.
Conclusion: The Poetry of the Present
• Although time dissolves at the fundamental level, our experience remains meaningful and profound.
• Celebrating the richness and fragility of the present moment.
• A call to embrace existence as it is — fleeting, relative, and infinitely precious.
