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Carlo Rovelli

Carlo Rovelli Quotes

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Famous Carlo Rovelli Quotes

“I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.”

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Book:L'ordine del tempo
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“There is no single time: there is a different duration for every trajectory; and time passes at different rhythms according to place and speed. It is not directional; the difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary euqations of the world; its oritentation is merely a contigent aspect that appears when we look at things and neglect the details. In this blurred view, the past of the universe was in a curioysly “particular” state. The notion of the “present” does not work; in the vast universe there is nothing that we can resonably call “present”. The substratum that determines the duration of time is not an independent entity, different from the others that make up the world; it is an aspect of a dynamic field. It jumps, fluactuates, materializies only by interacting, and is not to be found beneath a minimum scale.”

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Book:The Order of Time
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“We never really see time. We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.”

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Author:Carlo Rovelli
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