Status Updates From The Order of Time

And it seems to me that life…is nothing other than this: the incessant cry of these emotions that drive us… Sometimes it is a cry of pain. Sometimes it is a song. (P.212)

Perhaps, ultimately, the emotional dimension of time is not the film of mist that prevents us from apprehending the nature of time objectively. Perhaps the emotion of time is precisely what time *is* for us. (P.201)

We are *histories* of ourselves, narratives… I am this long ongoing novel. My life consists of it. (P.178)

This is what time is: it is entirely in the present, in our minds, as memory and as anticipation. (P.182)

Hard mental yakka!

What makes the world go round are not sources of energy but sources of low entropy. (P.160)

But memory, causes and effects, flow, the determined nature of the past and the indeterminacy of the future are nothing but names we give to the consequences of a statistical fact: the improbability of a past state of the universe. (P.169)

While the book is intellectually hard work, the suggestion of a new way of seeing things brings its own excitement that is sustaining. Releasing the old, well worn beliefs is hard.

I do enjoy Carlo Rovelli’s light touch and imaginative approach to what might be a leaden bullet to bite down on. The thought of a complete, coherent and structured universe, at both the micro and macro level, is appealing.

The flow of time is not a characteristic of the universe…it is due to the particular perspective that we have from our corner of it. (P.150)

What is special is not the state of the early universe: it is the small system *S* to which we belong. (P.156)