![]() ![]() ![]() Piazza Verdi is flocked with a lively crowd of students. He rarely visits Bologna, and he has been catching up with old friends. Photograph: Roberto Serra / Iguana Press / G/Iguana Press / Getty Images Now comes The Order of Time, a dizzying, poetic work in which I found myself abandoning everything I thought I knew about time – certainly the idea that it “flows”, and even that it exists at all, in any profound sense.Ĭarlo Rovelli in Bologna. His book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, with its concise, sparkling essays on subjects such as black holes and quanta, has sold 1.3m copies worldwide. When we wake from a vivid dream we are dimly aware that the sense of time we have just experienced is illusory.Ĭarlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who wants to make the uninitiated grasp the excitement of his field. ![]() When Juliet is waiting for Romeo, time passes sluggishly: she longs for Phaethon to take the reins of the Sun’s chariot, since he would whip up the horses and “bring in cloudy night immediately”. They tell us that the past might be inescapable, immanent in objects or people or landscapes. ![]() Or does it? Poets also tell us that time stumbles or creeps or slows or even, at times, seems to stop. W hat do we know about time? Language tells us that it “passes”, it moves like a great river, inexorably dragging us with it, and, in the end, washes us up on its shore while it continues, unstoppable. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |