There is no single universal time. What there is, is relation — and it is relation that leaves a trace behind. Everything in the world is a trace, and everything will become one.
Source · Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
My apologies — this is a shopworn attention-grabbing title
— Reflections on Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
In the broad sense, no universal and unified time exists.
This differs from the narrow sense, in which different subjects offer subjective interpretations of “time.”
“Time” itself simply does not exist universally and uniformly.
Wealth, Poverty and Politics, still warm in my mind, holds that the world’s baseline condition is uneven and undispersed.
Compared with abstract physics, this is easier for me to grasp.
Having read The Order of Time,
perhaps that baseline can be extended and generalized.
The world is asymmetrical.
The world is uneven, undispersed, non-uniform, and not necessarily coherent (coherent — a word I happened to review today).
Terrain is uneven; rainfall is undispersed.
And our “uniformity” is only relative and blurry — otherwise I would hardly need to go to such lengths relearning sociological definitions and could simply sit the exam. The process of entropy increase is not necessarily continuous: once heat has finished exchanging and the system enters equilibrium, a low-entropy source must be introduced to begin the next round of exchange. Unfortunately, we can scarcely measure the waiting interval of each round with precision.
But most importantly:
The world changes, and changes forever — especially at scales our eyes cannot measure. Yet we attend too closely to our own proprioception and overlook those minute changes.
And it is precisely change that lets us truly distinguish the past from the present.
But change does not originate in time. Change comes from the relations between things.
It is relation that gives time its meaning.
Having mentioned Wealth, Poverty and Politics, forgive me a digression.
Faced with objective asymmetry, the best we can do is: work to cross the barriers, and develop and accumulate human capital.
Geographic, political, and cultural barriers are important factors producing the asymmetry of the present — but the man-made barriers of politics and culture are becoming ever more conspicuous: the backwardness of mountain regions, the consequences of discrimination.
Yet possessing favorable timing and favorable terrain does not mean permanence, because human capital determines the manner and extent to which resources are used — abundant natural resources ≠ wealth; scarcity ≠ poverty.
But do we really need that broadly symmetrical time?
Our knowledge of this world is not confined to a single precise mode of cognition; perception is also an important way of dwelling with it.
Sociology’s two attributes of the person — the biological and the social — offer me a small illumination: human action is chiefly governed by the social.
These past two days I have suddenly taken an interest in The Three-Body Problem.
The line from its early scenes — “Physics no longer exists” — struck me deeply.
As is well known, I understand nothing of the highly abstract foundational disciplines that demand such intelligence.
But perhaps “physics no longer exists” would not affect my life either.
We do not necessarily need “time.”
But we certainly need relation with one another.
Relation produces exchange.
Exchange is the exchange of heat. Entropy cannot be reversed; the past cannot be recalled. The manifestation of low entropy is the proof that we have left a trace in this world.
We necessarily belong to the past. The “present” us are the result of entropy increase.
And this moment, in which I strike the keys and write these lines, becomes the past — and this passage is the trace.
All things in the world are traces, and all will be traces.
Most of our perception of this world does not rest on an absolutely precise, objective, and unified understanding.
Yet this seems not to have affected what we call “the daily life of the present.”
I am suddenly reminded of a line from The Algorithm of Life: precise vagueness beats vague precision — a restatement of Keynes’s preference for being roughly right over precisely wrong.
Of course, this does not mean we need no longer explore and seek a precise, objective, unified understanding of this world.
The reality is that humanity has not, in fact, been walking that road.
Finally, two lines I cannot forget, and which you may share:
“Without emotion, without love, loss would bring no pain. Therefore even the pain that loss brings is a good thing — even a beautiful one — because it fills life with meaning.” — Carlo Rovelli
“Countless people die each day, and yet the living go on living as though they were immortal.” — The Mahabharata
I only answer from what is written on this site.
Type a few words — I will show you where it says so.