--- product_id: 171416618 title: "The Order of Time" price: "£12.07" currency: GBP in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/171416618-the-order-of-time store_origin: GB region: United Kingdom --- # The Order of Time **Price:** £12.07 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** The Order of Time - **How much does it cost?** £12.07 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.co.uk](https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/171416618-the-order-of-time) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description One of TIME’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade "Meet the new Stephen Hawking . . . The Order of Time is a dazzling book." -- The Sunday Times From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics , Reality Is Not What It Seems , Helgoland , and Anaximander comes a concise, elegant exploration of time. Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to "flow"? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe. Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time. Review: Hawking & Sagan in one: An abstract journey sure to inform and entertain - Carlo Rovelli has the brilliance of Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein and the communicative skills of Carl Sagan. Otherwise he is an Italian theoretical physicist that specializes in quantum gravity and is a proponent, if not quite an advocate, of loop theory. Beyond that he is a philosopher with a heart for ancient poetry and love. And he brings all of it to bear in this delightful book about time, which, in the end, is life, and everything, including the context in which it unfolds. It would be in error to suggest that time doesn’t exist, but it would be equally in error to suggest that time is as simple as the continuum we record with our clocks. What I like most about the book is the fact that Rovelli recognizes that philosophy and science, if not two sides of the same coin, are cousins. He refers to Proust, which few scientists do, and suggests that while reason is among the best tools available for interpreting our “collective delirium,” it is “only an instrument, a pincer.” The science and the prose are very accessible. You will, however, have to be willing to think abstractly, a skill that in our wired, binary world seems to be greatly dissipating. And he is the first scientist I have read in a while who takes time to explain why the problem is sometimes not the science itself, but the limitations of language. Language is a human construction and has not kept up with our scientific revelation. Which is why theoretical physicists sometimes seem to be speaking another language. If only there was another language that was constructed in the world as we know it today, our communication would be so much easier and our knowledge would expand more rapidly. It would be impossible to summarize the knowledge contained in this book. You really have to read it. Here is a start, however: “The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.” If you can comprehend that the rest is largely additional perspective. And if the idea that universal time doesn’t exist in any absolute sense seems a stretch, consider Rovelli’s simple explanation (I’m paraphrasing): People never used to worry about clocks. They worried about the cycle of sunshine and darkness. But that cycle is different in every single village, town, and city on the planet. The cycle varies both east to west and north to south. And back when we used to spend our lives in our little village we didn’t care. But then the scientists and engineers invented trains to take us from one village to the next. And people needed to know when the train left their village. But how can you develop a timetable when every village has its own time? You can’t. But, at the same time, it’s not quite practical to say that the whole world has just one time. Farmers don’t care what the sun is doing in London. They care what it’s doing on their farm. (China actually has no time zones by edict. The entire country is on Beijing time and there are significant practical limitations.) The solution was the time zone, and it’s a compromise. Time zones are a construct and practical in the local sense, but highly inaccurate when talking about the universe. In the language of theoretical physics, they don’t exist. Eastern philosophers believe that reality is not knowable. It is real, but is made up of an infinite number of variables. We can only comprehend or think about a handful at a time. A tree is real. I can touch it and smell it. But it is not entirely knowable because there are too many variables (e.g. altitude, climate, soil, etc.) that define each tree for me to know them all. Time is the same way. Time is real but it is not knowable. Throw in the limitations of language and it begins to look like an illusion. To his great credit, Rovelli admits that there is much we don’t know. Think of a Seurat painting that has been blacked out. We have exposed a few, perhaps 10% (my number), of the original dots of pigment. It’s a lot, but we’re still guessing as to what the underlying picture is. And that’s pretty exciting. The key to our understanding to date, however, is the second law of thermodynamics which states that entropy can never decrease. It’s critical to our understanding of time, as Rovelli explains. Personally I’m not convinced it’s inviolate. Perhaps we just haven’t uncovered enough dots of pigment yet. If entropy could work both ways it would explain a lot, but attraction does not equal fact. (Entropy obviously has a big role in causality, of course. Bidirectional entropy would be a huge boost for inductive reason.) It’s a short book and even if you get through a small amount of it you will learn a lot. Beyond writing in an accessible way, Rovelli comes off as very personable. The perfect person to sit down and share a cup of coffee with. If only he had the time. (Sorry) A marvelous book that I highly recommend. Review: Somewhat Disappointing. - Rovelli is a physicist, but in this book he comes across as more of a philosopher, taking on the meanings of "here", "now", and even death and life. I was hoping for more of the physics of time and how it factors into the equations that describe the world we live in. Could time be fundamental and determine the "speed" of causality and light? Not even a hint of this from Rovelli. Maybe time is simply too difficult to understand and, therefore, not included in our physics. However the physics of time was addressed only in the first couple of chapters, in which he noted that time is a factor in only one equation of classical physics, and none in quantum physics. How can this be -- that time is not a factor in the physics of our world and universe when we live with it every day? In fact, Rovelli essentially dismisses time altogether. He says," Perhaps the [human] emotion of time is precisely what time IS for us. I don't think there is much more than this to be understood." Wow! In this respect, I was a bit disappointed in the book, although it is well written and easy to read. Lots of deep-thought philosophy, and references to ancient and contemporary philosophers. There was only one simple equation (although there were equations in the footnotes), not even Einstein's famous equation, although many mentions of Einstein himself. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a philosophical approach to the meaning of time, but very little of the theoretical physics of time, even though the author is a theoretical physicist, working on the elusive topic of quantum gravity. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #8,434 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #1 in Physics of Time (Books) #1 in Relativity Physics (Books) #2 in Cosmology (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 5,850 Reviews | ## Images ![The Order of Time - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/613Ky9KA0vL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Hawking & Sagan in one: An abstract journey sure to inform and entertain *by G***R on May 19, 2018* Carlo Rovelli has the brilliance of Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein and the communicative skills of Carl Sagan. Otherwise he is an Italian theoretical physicist that specializes in quantum gravity and is a proponent, if not quite an advocate, of loop theory. Beyond that he is a philosopher with a heart for ancient poetry and love. And he brings all of it to bear in this delightful book about time, which, in the end, is life, and everything, including the context in which it unfolds. It would be in error to suggest that time doesn’t exist, but it would be equally in error to suggest that time is as simple as the continuum we record with our clocks. What I like most about the book is the fact that Rovelli recognizes that philosophy and science, if not two sides of the same coin, are cousins. He refers to Proust, which few scientists do, and suggests that while reason is among the best tools available for interpreting our “collective delirium,” it is “only an instrument, a pincer.” The science and the prose are very accessible. You will, however, have to be willing to think abstractly, a skill that in our wired, binary world seems to be greatly dissipating. And he is the first scientist I have read in a while who takes time to explain why the problem is sometimes not the science itself, but the limitations of language. Language is a human construction and has not kept up with our scientific revelation. Which is why theoretical physicists sometimes seem to be speaking another language. If only there was another language that was constructed in the world as we know it today, our communication would be so much easier and our knowledge would expand more rapidly. It would be impossible to summarize the knowledge contained in this book. You really have to read it. Here is a start, however: “The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.” If you can comprehend that the rest is largely additional perspective. And if the idea that universal time doesn’t exist in any absolute sense seems a stretch, consider Rovelli’s simple explanation (I’m paraphrasing): People never used to worry about clocks. They worried about the cycle of sunshine and darkness. But that cycle is different in every single village, town, and city on the planet. The cycle varies both east to west and north to south. And back when we used to spend our lives in our little village we didn’t care. But then the scientists and engineers invented trains to take us from one village to the next. And people needed to know when the train left their village. But how can you develop a timetable when every village has its own time? You can’t. But, at the same time, it’s not quite practical to say that the whole world has just one time. Farmers don’t care what the sun is doing in London. They care what it’s doing on their farm. (China actually has no time zones by edict. The entire country is on Beijing time and there are significant practical limitations.) The solution was the time zone, and it’s a compromise. Time zones are a construct and practical in the local sense, but highly inaccurate when talking about the universe. In the language of theoretical physics, they don’t exist. Eastern philosophers believe that reality is not knowable. It is real, but is made up of an infinite number of variables. We can only comprehend or think about a handful at a time. A tree is real. I can touch it and smell it. But it is not entirely knowable because there are too many variables (e.g. altitude, climate, soil, etc.) that define each tree for me to know them all. Time is the same way. Time is real but it is not knowable. Throw in the limitations of language and it begins to look like an illusion. To his great credit, Rovelli admits that there is much we don’t know. Think of a Seurat painting that has been blacked out. We have exposed a few, perhaps 10% (my number), of the original dots of pigment. It’s a lot, but we’re still guessing as to what the underlying picture is. And that’s pretty exciting. The key to our understanding to date, however, is the second law of thermodynamics which states that entropy can never decrease. It’s critical to our understanding of time, as Rovelli explains. Personally I’m not convinced it’s inviolate. Perhaps we just haven’t uncovered enough dots of pigment yet. If entropy could work both ways it would explain a lot, but attraction does not equal fact. (Entropy obviously has a big role in causality, of course. Bidirectional entropy would be a huge boost for inductive reason.) It’s a short book and even if you get through a small amount of it you will learn a lot. Beyond writing in an accessible way, Rovelli comes off as very personable. The perfect person to sit down and share a cup of coffee with. If only he had the time. (Sorry) A marvelous book that I highly recommend. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Somewhat Disappointing. *by A***N on April 12, 2025* Rovelli is a physicist, but in this book he comes across as more of a philosopher, taking on the meanings of "here", "now", and even death and life. I was hoping for more of the physics of time and how it factors into the equations that describe the world we live in. Could time be fundamental and determine the "speed" of causality and light? Not even a hint of this from Rovelli. Maybe time is simply too difficult to understand and, therefore, not included in our physics. However the physics of time was addressed only in the first couple of chapters, in which he noted that time is a factor in only one equation of classical physics, and none in quantum physics. How can this be -- that time is not a factor in the physics of our world and universe when we live with it every day? In fact, Rovelli essentially dismisses time altogether. He says," Perhaps the [human] emotion of time is precisely what time IS for us. I don't think there is much more than this to be understood." Wow! In this respect, I was a bit disappointed in the book, although it is well written and easy to read. Lots of deep-thought philosophy, and references to ancient and contemporary philosophers. There was only one simple equation (although there were equations in the footnotes), not even Einstein's famous equation, although many mentions of Einstein himself. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a philosophical approach to the meaning of time, but very little of the theoretical physics of time, even though the author is a theoretical physicist, working on the elusive topic of quantum gravity. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great book if I understand it, but here is my question. . . *by F***N on June 8, 2018* Terrific; I think I get it but if so, here is my issue: Professor Rovelli and Nietzsche agree that there are no ‘things.’ They both make the statement that to understand the cosmos, one must put away the idea of ‘being’ and instead work with the idea of ‘becoming.’ They both describe a material universe of constant motion, constant change, and no permanent form. They are doubtless both right. Nietzsche is especially impressive here because he comes up with Quantum Loop Theory half a century before General Relativity. N even states that the universe is finite (Rovelli agrees) made up of something that combines and recombines in every conceivable way and then, exhausting all possibilities of novel patterning, repeats. This last idea was Hume’s and the Vedic scholars first, but as eternal recurrence and Ecclesiastes both teach us, nothing is new. . . I am always inclined to follow N, but here I have a problem as I did with Professor R’s explanations throughout; in what serum host is all this happening? Where is the space (yeah) needed for all these impulses and (literally) quanta of power to swim around and bounce off each other? Rovelli says that we should discard the notion of things (and here I am on board; things happen in our heads, like colors and material continuities.) He says we should think instead of events. The cosmos is made of events, which he defines as the collision of. . . quantum field/particles (?) Here he loses me. In what does a quantum field operate? If everything is made of stuff (General Ontological Directive #2: If everything exists, it must be made out of stuff. Anything that is not made out of stuff probably doesn’t exist and (according to #1,) has to be left out of the explanation,) then the fields are made out of stuff too. I think the definitions of ‘field’ are much too mathematical and romantic. Rovelli is real clear that ‘space’ is inherent in the quanta and their configuration; they cannot be the space in which they move. Things change in time and space, things bounce off each other in time and space. To say there is no such thing as time (t -per Newton, or absolute space/time -per Einstein) and then say everything is always changing and becoming and banging around strikes me as incoherent. If all the world is made of ‘grains’ of Planck time/Planck scale quanta, these quanta are only in their places in space/time (you gotta have space/time.) They don’t change, bounce, vibrate, pulsate, ooze, or do anything else that is entertaining. They just are. They don’t last long enough to change (the older notion was that they would persist through time, but we got rid of that kind of time.) The observer constructs the world of movement by looking over the configuration of different quanta in the ‘time’ (new style) vector of space/time available to him and infers continuity and thus these phenomena. Change is incompatible with existence. The cosmos is, time emerges in the imagination of the observer. Parmenides was right. The much-loved Anaximander know that the world was a big Planck time nanosecond (which is identical to eternity) and nothing changes; the being who imagines himself an individual different from the entirety of existence justly goes to death because any riff in space/time only applies to a region which finds itself only a scratch on the surface of unchanging being. ## Frequently Bought Together - The Order of Time - Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity - Seven Brief Lessons on Physics --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/171416618-the-order-of-time](https://www.desertcart.co.uk/products/171416618-the-order-of-time) --- *Product available on Desertcart United Kingdom* *Store origin: GB* *Last updated: 2026-07-06*