So if a man who has lived at sea-level meets his twin who has lived in the mountains, he will find that his sibling is slightly older. In his general theory of relativity (published over a century ago in 1915) he predicted that time passes more quickly “high up” than below, nearer to the Earth. Fortified with quotations from Proust, Anaximander and the Grateful Dead (Rovelli has a hippyish past), the book continues a tradition of jargon-free scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specialisation of the last century.Ĭlock time, said Einstein, is an illusion. The Order of Time, a deeper, more abstruse meditation, elucidates some of the key developments in the philosophy and physics of time. His poetic essay collection Seven Brief Lessons on Physics sold more than a million copies in English translation in 2017 and remains one of the fastest-selling science books ever. Known for his work on loop quantum gravity theory and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaximander, Rovelli is one of our great scientific explicators. Fortunately, the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli writes of “warped time” and other tentative physics with incisive clarity.

Einstein’s notion that time and space are essentially one (the concept of curved “spacetime”) is the stuff of abstract poetry. Nobody said that relativity theory was easy. Albert Einstein was indeed Jewish, but had he masterminded a “world crisis” in physics, as the anti-relativity lobby insisted? Hardly. To forward-looking German physicists such as Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg, the idea that relativity was a “Jewish fraud” was manifest nonsense. “German physics” (sometimes called “Aryan physics”) failed to make inroads in 1930s Germany because its champions were so plainly deluded.

The troubling uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity and other physical exotica were viewed as “Jewish science” inimical to German nationhood and the Newtonian mechanics of Deutsche Physik.

I n Hitler’s Germany, a handful of physicists bristled at the mere mention of quantum theory.

The order of time carlo rovelli