Books Seeds of Story There Is No “Now”: Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time Are you ready to rethink everything you know about time? By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on November 18, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time. It’s an ambitious book, attempting to get across some extremely unintuitive quantum physics findings while also explaining why they’re unintuitive. It’s both a description of how the Earth orbits the sun, and of why our eyes show us the sun rising in the east—but for relativistic time instead of planetary movements. What It’s About Greg McNeilly’s review of The Order of Time warns: “Some books explain, and some books unmoor.” Rovelli’s book falls into the latter category, and I’m going to do a better job explaining the parts that fray one’s ideas about life, the universe, and everything than the parts that pull them back together. Educated moderns are aware, of course, that time is relative. Einstein showed that if someone is moving faster than you, they will experience less time relative to the amount that you experience. The same holds for gravity; identical clocks at sea level and the top of a mountain show less time passing at sea level. English grammar and vocabulary, as Rovelli points out, are already insufficient to this insight, suggesting such unpleasant sentences as “Time takes more time to pass, the lower you go.” At a quantum level, the universe is made of fields. Dirac fields produce matter. Electromagnetic fields produce what it says on the tin. Time emerges from the gravitic field, explaining (sort of) why they are so closely interconnected. From here we get into more fraying: time doesn’t merely differ at different locations and speeds, but can only be described relatively. Time appears through relationships: causal interactions between events. Examined grand-scale, all aspects of the universe are events rather than objects. Atoms are defined by the movement of electrons; molecules and wombats and stars are defined by the temporary confluence of atoms. They are ephemeral, complex processes that cause and are caused by other ephemeral, complex processes. Or as Rovelli poetically puts it, “The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.” Remember Sara Imari Walker talking about the “lineage” of complex life? Just as humans have ancestors, descendants, and other people who are neither of those things, so event-objects in general have causes, effects, and things that are neither. And a linear flow of time can only be described for things in the same causal chain. That means that there is no universal “now,” because we can only have causal relationships with things on, say, Proxima Centauri that are 4.2 years in our past or future. (But can’t you just count 4.2 years forward from your last Proximan cause and say that’s equivalent to our “now”? No, because of all those other factors that affect how much time time takes. I think. My eyes are crossing; I enjoy it, but it doesn’t make my explanations more coherent.) Uncrossing your eyes a little, and ruining a lot of technobabble, this causal interconnection is what physicists mean by “observation” or “measurement.” The indeterminacy of electrons is resolved by interaction with other physical processes. There’s nothing special about sapient observation other than that it’s inherently a part of our ability to report on such interaction. Time, like cats or teams or height above the ground, is a phenomenon that emerges from causal interactions. It depends on heat, the flow of which is the only physical process that moves one-way-only. But like speed, entropy can be defined only relatively: The low initial entropy of the universe might be due to the particular way in which we—the physical system that we are part of—interact with it. We are attuned to a very particular subset of aspects of the universe, and it is this that is oriented in time… Here, ‘we’ refers to that collection of physical variables to which we commonly have access and by means of which we describe the universe. Rovelli is suggesting that our perception of time’s flow, like our perception of the movements of the sun, may be a product of our particular situation relative to the rest of the universe. But it is this situation that makes us possible; in a relative situation that did not involve the linear increase of entropy, we wouldn’t exist. Life consists of intertwined processes for temporarily decreasing local entropy: photosynthesis passes low entropy from the sun to plants; consumption passes that low entropy to animals or fungi. I resort, again, to a quote: …in the boundless variety of the universe, it may happen that there are physical systems that interact with the rest of the world through those particular variables that define an initial low entropy. With regard to these systems, entropy is constantly increasing. There, and not elsewhere, there are the typical phenomena associated with the flowing of time: life is possible, together with evolution, thought, and our awareness of time passing. There, the apples grow that produce our cider: time. That sweet juice that contains all the ambrosia and all the gall of life. Buy the Book The Order of Time Carlo Rovelli Buy Book The Order of Time Carlo Rovelli Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget I try to be humble in my understanding of even lay explanations of quantum mechanics. This is because I’ve seen what happens when intelligent physicists decide that they understand psychology. It’s quite possible that consciousness can be explained by quantum interactions, but they’re not doing it. For a science fiction author, the risks of cross-disciplinary hubris are mostly limited to unintentional technobabble, and mockery. I love me some interstellar mycelial networks controlled by giant tardigrades, but I try not to confuse them with inspiration by actual physics. I do love a really brain-breaking book about how intuitions break down, though. And I can’t entirely resist thinking about the psychology of those intuitions—an overlap with my field in which Rovelli has useful insights. For example, the psychology of time perception is more complicated than one might expect: we don’t, in fact, perceive one second per second, as any bored 10-year-old or expert meditator can tell you. So perhaps one day, with sufficiently advanced scientific explanations, we will be able to cognitively encompass time’s relativity, just as we can understand the Earth’s orbit while watching a spectacular sunset. Today, at least for me, is not that day. Perhaps the impossible-to-identify today-on-Proxima-Centauri is when it happens. I do gain a little understanding from Rovelli’s explanations of terms like “chaos” and “observation” that don’t mean the same thing in quantum physics as in lay use, and that often feed into the above-mentioned technobabble. The “increased chaos” of entropy is really the increasingly diffused spread of heat, or the decrease in “particular situations” relative to indistinguishable situations. You are a particular situation, distinguishable from another human, a slime mold, or a star. At least at certain levels of analytic detail. Which is what Rovelli means by “entropy is relative.” For a speculative fiction fan, The Order of Time will simultaneously leave you with all the sensawunda you could desire, and also a sense of the (current?) limits of our senses and intuitions. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Is Time Travel Possible? Is It Meaningful? A lot of stories hang off the idea that, if you could only find the right direction, you could travel to another time as easily as to another place. Rovelli denies the concept of time as a fourth spatial dimension—but it’s not a one-dimensional universal arrow, either. If time consists of sets of causal light cones, it seems likely that you could, at least, get to something in another causal light cone. What would that look like? I don’t know! Godel, apparently, calculated the possibility of looped sets of causal cones “such that, advancing always toward the future, one can return to the same point in spacetime.” Rovelli promises that there is no way this could result in killing your own grandparents. Life and Time as No One Knows Them. I spent a lot of this book taking notes on seeming intersections with Sara Imari Walker’s Life As No One Knows It, most of which are probably wrong. Is the opening of new “channels” for the spread of entropy the same thing as increases in assembly index? That would make entropy and increases in assembly complexity different aspects of the same phenomenon that in turn defines time. Rovelli defines the arrow(s) of time as directions in which “the past leaves traces of itself in the present,” which likewise seems to map to Walker’s concept of lineage. We need to put Rovelli, Walker, and a good hard SF writer in a room together, and see what comes out. Why We Think What We Think When We Think About Time. Cultural and individual intuitions about time are shaped by the technologies that we use to track it. Before clocks, we measured time based on the shifting local movements of sun and stars, and coordinated meetings for solar noon or the rise of the moon. Extremely locally, you could use a sundial or candlemarks. Between that and atomic clocks lie a whole set of technologies for increasing granularity and long-distance coordination. These in turn are required by, and enable, things like railroads and telegraphs. You can’t catch your train without time zones, something we never worried about when the maximum horsepower was a carriage team. So what temporal technologies do you need to schedule ansible shifts? How would we define time zones to keep a generation ship running at .3 C coordinated with the relative time on Earth? Lots of room for fun worldbuilding, and for a wide range of attitudes toward entropy. New Growth: What Else to Read Le Guin was one of the masters of taking temporal technology and culture seriously. The most obvious example is The Dispossessed, which explores the concept of simultaneity at levels ranging from spirituality to story structure to scientific research. Changing perceptions of time lead to the development of the ansible, which allows instantaneous communication across interstellar distances. But much of her work integrates anthropology and Buddhist philosophy to explore varied human experiences of time. Ted Chiang is a modern master of both imagining different temporal cultures—I’ve already mentioned “The Story of Your Life” in the Sapir-Whorf post—and how experience is affected by physics. Books like Rovelli’s make me suspect that our own physics is not less weird than the what-ifs depicted in “Tower of Babylon” or “Seventy-Two Letters.” There are plenty of books out there about brain-breaking physics. One of my householdmates particularly recommends Katie Mack’s The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking). I’ve also heard good things about Sean Carroll’s Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime and Dan Hooper’s At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of Our Universe’s First Seconds. On the time-and-culture side, Edward T. Hall’s The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time is a classic source on how humans perceive time, and why some people think it’s fine to be half an hour later to a meeting while others think five minutes is too long. Dava Sobel’s Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time goes deep on one historical challenge in temporal technology, and the adventures and insights surrounding it. What physics breaks your brain? What apparent paradoxes are you try to get your mind around? 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