Another comes from the long-standing debate over exactly how the maths of quantum physics connects to the story of the physical events themselves (the quantum measurement problem). For example, one of the counter-arguments comes from the physics of black holes and Hawking radiation (the black hole information paradox). This is widely thought to be so because quantum mechanics seems to suggest it, but it is not known and there is evidence in the other direction.
He appears to be advancing the hypothesis that the entire story of the cosmos is based on time-reversible basic processes. For example, they do not constitute the correct description in full, because we do not know what that correct description is. Such equations are 'fundamental' in certain respects, but not in others. I think he must be referring to various equations that make up the way physics at the level of space, time and basic constituents of the cosmos is currently formulated. I have not read the book you are citing, but I note the use of the phrase 'the fundamental equations'. This is one of several possible candidates for a theory of quantum gravity, and it has not yet been experimental verified (or disproved). When he says "quantum gravity" he means the particular version of loop quantum gravity on which he works. The fundamental equations of quantum gravity are effectively formulated like this: they do not have a time variable, and they describe the world by indicating the possible relations between variable quantities. Later on, in Chapter 8 "Dynamics as Relation" he says In mathematical terms, this is the difference between a total order and a partial order.Īt this point Rovelli has spent the first five chapters of the book showing that our intuitive notion of time as a continuous and independent background to everything in the universe is flawed, and has been demolished successively by thermodynamics, general relativity and quantum mechanics. What he disagrees with is the idea that events occur in a fixed sequence - instead, he sees them as forming a complex network. Rovelli agrees that events have duration. They crowd around chaotically, like the Italians.
The events of the world do not form an orderly queue, like the English. On the contrary, it implies a world in which change is ubiquitous, without being order by Father Time without innumerable events being necessarily distributed in good order, or along the single Newtonian timeline or according to Einstein's elegant geometry. The absence of the quantity 'time' in the fundamental equations does not imply a world that is frozen and immobile.
I cannot find the exact words that you quote in Rovelli's book, but a similar phrase occurs near the beginning of Chapter 6 "The World is Made of Events not Things".
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