The physicists Marc Warner and Emanuele Moscato met Professor Carlo Rovelli, author of the bestselling Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Together they questioned him about his latest book, The Order of Time, which has been compared with the work of Stephen Hawking. Their conversation explains and explores the meaning of time, as it is and as we perceive it to be.
A theory of time
A practical reader of your book The Order of Time might wonder why we care about time, when it seems so obvious and so universal. Why would a physicist pay any attention to it?
Nobody is obliged to be informed about the reality of the world, but it is a fact that time works differently to our common experience of it. I would say it is precisely because time is so familiar and apparently not problematic to us that it is interesting and surprising to discover that the more we look into it, the more unusual it appears.
