Time is wicked, and it holds us hostage. Ham over swiss, a friendship, a bus ride: all function within the constraints of the inner workings of time. Each of us has our own intimate relationship with the past, present, and imagined future. So—before we panic—the precarious, spinning wheel of time reveals itself through the eyes of one Italian theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, a poet of the sciences who provokes the reader compassionately and coherently, tempting us with various inquiries, some emotional, some scientific (such as, when we look through a telescope, are we looking out into the past or the future?).
By the arrival of the telegraph in the nineteenth century, our comprehension of timetables forced us into proposing standardized time; this changed everything. Not very far before, we based our lives on the diurnal rhythms of animal and plant life, primal sensations relative to the moon’s cycles, our hormones and molecular organisms that make up the biochemistry of our internal clocks. So where does this leave us? Slaves to something we cannot see? We can access this ancient knowledge so that we may measure the ways time changes us, the main detrimental frustration we currently face. But, if nothing changes, does time not exist?—and which is more frightening to acknowledge? Rovelli’s The Order of Time delicately mends ideas of linear time. He convinces us that the relationship between time and change is not illusory, but is a grammatical question rather than a globally-determined one.
Time is hungry and never satisfied. Its jelly-like wingspan veils our vascular system, tugs at our quantum breath, our gravitational subconscious. We’re left at the mercy of time, begging for an understanding, an extension. We stand there sucking our thumbs while pleading for more—more time! —only to come to the realization that time is the anchor which we cannot always navigate. One may measure time by marking events along a continuum, but to define the order of time takes a specific set of skills. As inebriated as we may be, duration is a not always a leisure; it is a sharp persistence shoving us into the corner, laughing outside our peripherals, begging us to figure where to go from ‘here’, how to love, and how to better comprehend the feeling of the loss of time. Rovelli tells us we can make peace with this loss, and introduces us to the freedom of chance in quantum physics, while reminding us how the mystical tower of our past reflects a mighty shadow; one barely reliable (yet vastly relatable) as the grin on our face subsides.