Temporal complexity

Zan Boag: You’ve delved into the mystery of time over the course of your life, a journey that has ultimately led to you writing your latest book The Order of Time. Why? What made you delve into this topic?

Carlo Rovelli: I guess there are two distinct answers. One is that I was fascinated by theoretical physics, I got fascinated in particular by the physics of the 20th century - by quantum mechanics, by general relativity - then I discovered that there is this open problem at the core of theoretical physics, which is quantum gravity, and I decided to study quantum gravity. The nature of time is at the centre of the problem of quantum gravity: addressing this problem requires rethinking what is space and what is time. The reason is that we discover things about space and time which don’t fit with our previous intuition and we have to adjust our understanding of space and time to what we have discovered and to the new physics we want to develop. That’s answer number one. There’s actually answer number two, which is the reverse. I got fascinated by quantum gravity precisely because it involves rethinking space and rethinking time, and I had been curious about that for a long time, much before getting to know physics – since my adolescence. When one is an adolescent, all the ideas get confused and one asks all sorts of philosophical questions: “What is reality?”, “What is being?”, “What is an illusion?”, including questions like “What is time?” and “What does it mean when time passes?”. I was an adolescent like that, I was confused, full of questions, very curious, very curious about what philosophy had to say about that. And when I discovered that there is a branch of physics that directly addresses these questions, and in fact shows that our intuitive understanding of space and time is wrong, I thought, “Wow, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life”, and I did.

Einstein has obviously had a profound influence on your work. How do you hope to build