The Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli offers a dizzying account of how physics has demolished most of what we understand about time. To make his argument, he draws on the direction of time and the entropy of the universe, the way our brains create memories and the very origins of our sense of self. We perceive time, he suggests, because we are “attuned” to a tiny slice of reality that is peculiarly “orientated” in time. “What we are,” in short, is “beings made of time”. It is a dazzling end to an ambitious book.
