**Forgotten Scent of the Madeleine **

If time is the fading cognitive impression of lower entropy states, then The Order of Time is timeless. And by that, I mean it left no impression.

Carlos Rovelli is an expert in quantum gravity even if * there has not yet been a theory of quantum gravity accepted by the scientific community or has obtained experimental support*. So, he writes popsci books with more literary references than math equations. This strategy (minus the literary references) worked for What is Real, and From Eternity to Here, but after finishing Order of Time I was hoping for more meat to the discussion of entropy or even the most cursory dealings with quantum waveforms to support and define his claim that time is an illusion.

On Entropy, he describes particularity as an abstraction of the mind * The notion of particularity is only important when we see the universe in a particular way. Boltzmann has shown that entropy exists because we describe the world in a blurred fashion. * This makes sense, but even 10 years after my last exposure to time and physics, my mind comes up with different questions: Why aren’t we just Boltzmann brains? What counts as necessary to make an abstraction? Why did entropy start so low? These answers must have been left on the editing room floor, too bad.

The discussion of the self from time is simple enough to intuit after the briefest encounters with Descarte. Rovelli prevers * dubito ergo cogito : I doubt therefore I am. … If somebody doubts something, they must have thought about it. And if they can think then they must exist.* I landed at rogavi ergo cogito : I asked therefore I am. I was hoping to make more progress than a few steps away from my neophyte musings.

Maybe this is a reasonable introduction to the mental models (though not actual* concepts) of relativity and entropy, but putting a side a few literary references, this book’s unsupported ideas left only an ephemeral taste.

** 78th book of 2022 **

Other thoughts:

  • The improbability of a correlation between two events requires something improbable. It is only the low entropy of the past that provides such improbability. * Still don’t understand this. Why must the past, or low entropy, equate to low probability?

*Math is just another mental model, but when it comes to physics, perhaps a far superior one. See: What is Mathematics, Really?