Order of Time

THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLEROne of TIME's Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade'Captivating, fascinating, profoundly beautiful. . . Rovelli is a wonderfully humane, gentle and witty guide for he is as much philosopher and poet as he is a scientist' John Banville'We are time. We are this space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We are memory. We are nostalgia. We are longing for a future that will not come'Time is a mystery that does not cease to puzzle us. Philosophers, artists and poets have long explored its meaning while scientists have found that its structure is different from the simple intuition we have of it. From Boltzmann to quantum theory, from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, our understanding of time has been undergoing radical transformations. Time flows at a different speed in different places, the past and the future differ far less than we might think, and the very notion of the present evaporates in the vast universe.With his extraordinary charm and sense of wonder, bringing together science, philosophy and art, Carlo Rovelli unravels this mystery. Enlightening and consoling, The Order of Time shows that to understand ourselves we need to reflect on time -- and to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves.Translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre

Modern physics has found its poet. A captivating, fascinating, profoundly beautiful book. . . Rovelli is a wonderfully humane, gentle and witty guide for he is as much philosopher and poet as he is a scientist, Wonderful. . . Time is something we think we know about instinctively; here he shows how profoundly strange it really is, Full of staggering revelations... I could (and will) read and think about such things again and again until they begin to sink in, This book has been a kind of bible for me. When life feels strange, Rovelli's books remind me that there is beauty in the strangeness. The Order of Time is one of those books that I will always go back to, Extraordinary. . . you should read it

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time. He has worked in Italy and the US, and is currently directing the quantum gravity research group of the Centre de physique théorique in Marseille, France. His books Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Helgoland, Reality Is Not What It Seems and The Order of Time are international bestsellers which have been translated into forty-three languages.