Category: What is Time?

Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell. POWERS OF TEN © 1977 EAMES OFFICE LLC (Available at www.eamesoffice.com)

Carlo Rovelli, physicist

In a conversation filled with loops, black holes, grains of space, this interview with physicist and historian Carlo Rovelli also poses the fascinating question, “What if time didn’t exist?”

Our understanding of the universe rests on two pillars: the theory of general relativity and quantum physics. Two theoretical constructions whose accuracy is nowadays precisely verified, but which do not speak to each other, which ignore each other, so to speak. Some researchers, such as the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, are working to fill this gap. Among other research directors at the CNRS and a professor at the Université de la Méditerranée in Marseille, Carlo Rovelli has developed, with the American Lee Smolin, the theory of quantum gravitation with loops aimed, as it were, at unifying general relativity and quantum physics.

Even if all this remains largely mysterious and incomprehensible to most of us, the sky lights up a little as we listen to Carlo Rovelli at the microphone of Stéphane Deligeorges in “Continent sciences”. In the course of a conversation filled with loops, black holes, grains of space, strings and networks of spins, a fascinating question arose which is also the title of a book by Carlo Rovelli: “What if time didn’t exist?”

With Lee Smolin, physics theorist, writer and teacher, at TimeWorld 2019, the International congress on Time. He is the founder of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (Youtube Channel)

With Stéphane Dugowson, mathematician, at TimeWorld 2019, the International congress on Time.

With Anatole Khelif, mathematician, at TimeWorld 2019, the International congress on Time.

With Stéphane Durand, physicist, at TimeWorld 2019, the International congress on Time.

With Jean-Philippe Uzan, cosmologist, at TimeWorld 2019, the International congress on Time.

With Patrice Serres, sinologist, at TimeWorld 2019, the International congress on Time.