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A review by erinhly
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
4.0
Not knowing anything about physics, I felt the best and only approach to a book about physics would be to 'let it wash over me'. This decision worked well in part because about half of this is poetry. I found it a beautiful and edifying reading experience; at times it evoked in me what I understand David Hume meant the 'temporal sublime' — the feeling of ourselves and our imagination amidst the vastness of the universe.
I felt like concepts such as entropy were explained reasonably well, though it lost me somewhat in the middle. I don't think that's necessarily a fault of the book's style or the author's skills, it could equally be translation issues or a lack of requisite understanding.
In a sense then, the authorial style protects it from criticism — it's a kind of comprehensive meditation in the style of Aquinas — poetic, scientific, psychological, satirical. But as another reviewer says, it doesn't really give us enough information to make an informed decision on say, the validity of loop theory against string theory.
So while I have no more 'certainty', I did, to borrow the words of another member of my book club, walk away from this with a 'much richer mental imagery with which to think about these questions'.
I felt like concepts such as entropy were explained reasonably well, though it lost me somewhat in the middle. I don't think that's necessarily a fault of the book's style or the author's skills, it could equally be translation issues or a lack of requisite understanding.
In a sense then, the authorial style protects it from criticism — it's a kind of comprehensive meditation in the style of Aquinas — poetic, scientific, psychological, satirical. But as another reviewer says, it doesn't really give us enough information to make an informed decision on say, the validity of loop theory against string theory.
So while I have no more 'certainty', I did, to borrow the words of another member of my book club, walk away from this with a 'much richer mental imagery with which to think about these questions'.