Carlo Rovelli: The Order of Time

The world is not like a platoon advancing at the pace of a single commander. It`s a network of events affecting each other.

Reality is often very different from what it seems. The Earth appears to be flat but is in fact spherical. The sun seems to revolve in the sky when it is really we who are spinning.

The motives by which we act are inscribed in our intimate structure as mammals, as hunters, as social beings: reason illuminates these connections, it does not generate them. We are not, in the first place, reasoning beings. We may perhaps become so, more or less, in the second. In the first instance, we are driven by a thirst for life, by hunger, by the need to love, by the instinct to find our place in human society... The second instance does not even exist without the first. Reason arbitrates between instincts but uses the very same instincts as primary criteria in its arbitration.

I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less so now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me. It did not scare me when I was young, and I thought at the time that this was because it was such a remote prospect. But now, at sixty, the fear has yet to arrive. I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to a well-earned rest.

Abstract thought can anticipate by centuries hypotheses that find a use - or confirmation - in scientific inquiry.

That which seems intuitive to us now is the result of scientific and philosophical elaborations in the past.

Slow, technical, cultural, and artistic advances made by innumerable workshops of painters and artisans were necessary before the Sistine Chapel was possible. But in the end, it was Michelangelo who painted it.

Don`t take your intuitions and ideas to be "natural": they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.

The difference between past and future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention... in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.

The ability to understand something before it`s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.

The best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.

In the mountains, we see a valley covered by a sea of white clouds. The surface of the clouds gleams, immaculate. We start to walk toward the valley. The air becomes more humid, then less clear; the sky is no longer blue. We find ourselves in a fog. Where did the well-defined surface of the clouds go? It vanished. Its disappearance is gradual; there is no surface that separates the fog from the sparse air of the heights. Was it an illusion? No, it was a view from afar. Come to think of it, it`s like this with all surfaces. This dense marble table would look like a fog if I were shrunk to a small enough, atomic scale. Everything in the world becomes blurred when seen close up. Where exactly does the mountain end and where do the plains begin? Where does the savannah begin and the desert end? We cut the world into large slices. We think of it in terms of concepts that are meaningful for us, that emerge at a certain scale.

As human beings, we live by emotions and thoughts. We exchange them when we are in the same place at the same time, talking to each other, looking into each other`s eyes, brushing against each other`s skin. We are nourished by this network of encounters and exchanges.

When we cannot formulate a problem with precision, it is often not because the problem is profound: it`s because the problem is false.

Fearing the transition, being afraid of death, is like being afraid of reality itself; like being afraid of the sun.