The Order Of Time Quotes
"Perhaps time is the greatest remaining mystery."
"I stop and do nothing. Nothing happens. I am thinking about nothing. I listen to the passing of time."
"What am I listening to when I listen to the passing of time?"
"Wonder is the source of our desire for knowledge."
"The universe unfolds into the future, dragged by time, and exists according to the order of time."
"Let’s begin with a simple fact: time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level."
"What does it really mean to say that time 'passes'?"
"Things are transformed one into another according to necessity, and render justice to one another according to the order of time."
"Heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one."
"Only where there is heat is there a distinction between past and future."
"The whole idea that the universe exists now in a certain configuration and changes together with the passage of time simply doesn’t stack up anymore."
"If nothing changes, there is no time, because time is nothing but the registering of movement."
"Time is only a way of measuring how things change."
"Time is nothing other than the measurement of change."
"There is a time that passes even when nothing changes."
"Before Newton, time for humanity was the way of counting how things changed."
"The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events."
"The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence."
"The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones."
"The world is more like Naples than Singapore."
"Even if this were the case, I am not sure that because Einstein has penned some phrase or other we should treat it as the utterance of an oracle."
"The world without a time variable is not a complicated one. It’s a net of interconnected events."
"The occurrence of these leaps draws the patterns that on a large scale appear to us like the smooth structure of spacetime."
"An unusual world, but not a meaningless one."
"During the course of this phase, inside the black hole and within its immediate vicinity there is no longer a single and determinate spacetime."
"Am I certain that this is the correct description of the world? I am not, but it is today the only coherent and complete way that I know of to think about the structure of spacetime."
"For every day of his life can say: 'Today I have lived.'"
"It is memory that solders together the processes, scattered across time, of which we are made."
"We see only the present; we can see things that we interpret as traces of the past, but there is a categorical difference between seeing traces of the past and perceiving the flow of time—and Augustine realizes that the root of this difference, the awareness of the passing of time, is internal."
"It is possible, Augustine observes, because our consciousness is based on memory and on anticipation."
"We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward predicting events in the future, toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this immense, chaotic universe."
"This space—memory—combined with our continuous process of anticipation, is the source of our sensing time as time, and ourselves as ourselves."
"Time opens up our limited access to the world."
"Time, then, is the form in which we beings, whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight, interact with the world: it is the source of our identity."
"We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time."
"Time is a strange thing. When we don’t need it, it is nothing. Then, suddenly, there is nothing else."
"We started out with the image of time that is familiar to us: something that flows uniformly and equally throughout the universe, in the course of which all things happen."
"This familiar picture has fallen apart, has shown itself to be only an approximation of a much more complex reality."
"Perhaps, ultimately, the emotional dimension of time is not the film of mist that prevents us from apprehending the nature of time objectively."
"Perhaps the emotion of time is precisely what time is for us."
"The mystery of time has always troubled us, stirring deep emotions."
"A precious miracle that the infinite play of combinations has unlocked for us, allowing us to exist."
"This brief life, is nothing other than this: the incessant cry of these emotions that drive us, that we sometimes attempt to channel in the name of a god, a political faith, in a ritual that reassures us that, fundamentally, everything is in order, in a great and boundless love—and the cry is beautiful."
"The state ρ = exp[‒H/kT] is determined by the Hamiltonian H that generates evolution of time."
"H = ‒_k_log[ρ] determines a Hamiltonian (up to a multiplicative constant), and thus a 'thermal' time, starting from the state ρ."
"In the language of quantum mechanics manuals, it is conventionally referred to as 'measure.'"
"The theorem of Tomita-Takesaki shows that a state on a von Neumann algebra defines a flow (a one-parameter family of modular automorphisms)."
"The internal automorphisms of the algebra referred to in the above note."
"In a von Neumann algebra, the thermal time of a state is exactly the same as Tomita’s flow! The state is KMS with respect to this flow."
"Thermodynamics is not a true description of the system; it is a description of these variables of the system—those through which we assume we are able to interact with the system."
"The importance of the existence of this ramified structure of interactions in the universe for the understanding of the growth of local entropy."
"The study of the dynamics of neurons in our brain shows how the phenomenon manifests itself in physical terms: the present of the physical state of my brain 'retains' its past state."
"The concept of time has its origins in society—and in particular in the religious structure that constitutes its primary form."