By Carlo Rovelli
I read this in the mornings of early April, 2024. I borrowed it from a friend, who got it from a blind book date from her workplace!
I loved it. He’s oddly poetic, quotations from the epics and references to grief and love in his own life. These asides are hit-and-miss, some gorgeous and some pandering, but the real star of the book is his exploration of time as a concept.
I need to reread it, but some ways of looking at the universe stuck with me. The idea of entropy being dependent on what we care about was particularly good, and highlighted a niggling subconscious doubt I’d had for a while: all states are unique, so how do we choose what information to lose? The answer, if I understood Rovelli correctly, is that our experience of time comes from us considering the macro-property of heat, in that only under this definition of entropy does entropy continuously increase, forming the arrow of time.
As I said, it needs a reread.