The lowdown: The Order of Time summary on the book by Carlo Rovelli explains everything you need to know about how time works and why we are all wrong.
You’re probably still mourning about Iron Man’s death in the latest Avengers film (sorry about the spoiler) but putting that aside, didn’t you leave the cinema with several questions about how time and space work? I know I did.
Yes, we know it’s a fiction movie and the ‘Time Heist’ doesn’t exist, but quantum physics does and that’s what The Oder of Time deals with.
Time is maybe the greatest mystery of all time. Many legendary physicists have studied time and came up with theories.
Thanks to Italian physicist Marco Rovelli, we will learn step by step everything we need to know about time, relativity, quantum mechanics, and more.
- Audible Audiobook
- Carlo Rovelli (Author) – Benedict Cumberbatch (Narrator)
- English (Publication Language)
- 05/08/2018 (Publication Date) – Penguin Audio (Publisher)
After you read The Order of Time you will be able to answer our three key lessons:
- Time moves at different speeds at different places
- Te world is made up of events rather than things
- Human history can’t exist without the sun
Lesson One: Time moves at different speeds at different places
Whether you believe it or not, time isn’t a simple thing to look upon just when you’re so desperate to leave your office or your class.
It is proved, time moves differently when it is measured at different places. Sounds confusing, but that the answer is relativity.
That famous theory discovered and proved by Albert Einstein last century is the key to this exciting phenomenon.
To be more specific, if you place a clock in the top of a mountain and another person on the shores of a sea, you will notice that the first runs faster than the second. Amazing huh? That only shows Einstein was right, each zone has its own “time”.
Lesson Two: The world is made up of events rather than things
You surely have heard the saying ‘Nothing is forever, everything will disappear, everyone will die’ and probably you never paid too much attention at what it means.
Physicists have a similar point of view of the world. See, they claim our planet isn’t made up of things but events.
The Earth is in a constant state of flux rather than immobility. And the principal support of that theory or point of view is time.
How long does a thing or an event last in time? That’s the only difference between them. For example, a rock is normally considered a thing; meanwhile, a party is obviously considered an event.
The rock will outlast the party for plenty of time. But after all the rock nothing more than an interaction of particles, so even the hardest and bigger rock will dust away in time.
Lesson Three: Human history can’t exist without the sun
In physics, there is a concept named entropy which is a way of quantifying how orderly things are.
Low entropy refers to high orderliness and high entropy refers to growing disorder.
History is about change. About how our past changes into our present and our present changes into our future and that change is due to an increase of entropy.
So if entropy must increase in order to have a change, then the first step of human history begins with low entropy. But what gives entropy to earth? To explain it very short, the sun. That enormous hot star is a source of low entropy that with several processes it will eventually be transformed into high entropy and with that change.
My personal takeaway
I have to admit I dropped the book the first time I took it, but later I said ‘screw it, I’m going to read that one’ and thanks god I did.
I won’t lie, it’s not an easy read. However, the more I read, the more I wanted to know.
In a business sense, the book is great at putting everything in perspective.
Put into action
The first thing you will do after reading this book is the same thing I did, revaluate everything I thought was right just in the way I saw it.
This book will help you understand how important physics is to our planet.
You should consider this book if…
If you are a Physics student or you are interested in how the world works, then you really need to read this book.
a Swedish university student, marketing professional, and life-long learner. Here at BookSummaryClub I summarize my favorite non-fiction books into easily digested posts. Hope you like what you’re reading!
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