Lab notes - Rovelli - 9/11

I'm in my lab to get my head around #quantumcomputing and using Carlo Rovelli's *The Order of Time* to melt my brain to an appropriate state

"The fact that we cannot arrange the universe like a simple orderly sequence of times does not mean that nothing happens. 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 a spiders web visible in the dew, where each droplet is a data producing (ie active) node. Lots of partial order relationships that comprise a complex adaptive system

Which doesn't need Newton's t to give us sufficient explanatory power and reduce uncertainty as to the next question. We don't chart our way through complexity: we feel our way through

"What confuses us... is only the fact that our grammar is organised around an absolute distinction - past/present/future - that is only partially apt, here in our immediate vicinity"

"We say that an event 'is' or 'has been' or 'will be'. We do not have a grammar adapted to say that an event 'has been in relation to me but is in relation to you'

Linearity shows our myopia and our words fail us

(Diagram using genealogy to illustrate basic model for order of time)