Lab notes - Rovelli - 8/11

I'm in my lab to get my head around #quantumcomputing quantum computing and using Carlo Rovelli's *The Order of Time* to melt my brain to an appropriate state. Episode 8/11

"The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical 'thing': we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an 'event': it makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not stones"

Rovelli is a treat to read

"The fact that we cannot arrange the universe like a single orderly sequence of times does not meant that nothing changes. It means that changes are not arranged in single orderly succession: the temporal structure of the world is more complex than a simple single linear succession of instants"

Picture all the graphs within reach with no horizontal axis marked 't'. That's the potential shape of a post-quantum computing world

There will, however, still be a horizontal axis, because we are measuring how things change *one in respect to the others*

We don't need Newton's t to understand how the things we see in the world vary with respect to each other. We do need variables that actually describe the world in observable (and measurable) terms