The order of time / Carlo Rovelli ; translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell.

Translation of: 'L'ordine del tempo'. First published in Italian in 2017.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Perahps time is the greatest mystery -- Part one: The crumbling of time (1. Loss of unity ; 2. Loss of direction ; 3. The end of the present ; 4. Loss of independence ; 5. Quanta of time) -- Part two: The world without time (6. The world is made of events, not things ; 7. The inadequacy of grammar ; 8. Dynamics as relation) -- Part three: The sources of time (9. Time is ignorance ; 10. Perspective ; 11. What emerges from a particularity ; 12. The scent of the madeleine ; 13. The sources of time) -- The sister of sleep.

"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."