October 29, 2025
Time flies? Rovelli says it doesn’t
Carlo Rovelli: 'Time Is an Illusion'
Physicist says time isn’t real; commenters clap, rage, and meme pigeons
TLDR: Physicist Carlo Rovelli argues time’s flow is a human perspective, not a universal feature. The community split: fans shared resources and praised his relational take, while skeptics demanded “physics without clocks” answers and cracked pigeon memes, debating whether this is profound insight or philosophical fog.
Carlo Rovelli, the sailor-physicist who once helped invent loop quantum gravity, says the flow of time is a grand illusion — more like the sky “rotating” than a cosmic clock. Cue the internet brawl. Fans dropped links like confetti, kicking off with this video and archived Hacker News threads, while skeptics stormed in asking how anything can “evolve” if time doesn’t exist. One furious critic branded theoretical physicists “idiot savants,” insisting that without clocks, physics is just poetry with equations. Supporters quoted Rovelli’s relational view — that reality only exists in interactions — and called it a mind-expanding way to read the universe, not woo.
The hottest debate circled Rovelli’s claim that the second law of thermodynamics — the rule that things tend to get messier — is a perspective, not a universal arrow. Some commenters loved the humility of “it’s real, but only for us,” while others saw philosophical smoke bombs obscuring hard science. Meanwhile, the pigeon line from the interview turned into memes: “If pigeons bob to measure reality, my calendar is a bird feeder.” There were nods to Rovelli’s activist past and the Enrico Fermi controversy, but the crowd mostly fixated on one question: if time is an illusion, who’s keeping score? For newcomers, links to earlier debates like 2018’s thread provided a breadcrumb trail — and a reminder that arguing about time takes, well, a lot of time.
Key Points
- •Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist affiliated with Aix-Marseille University, interviewed by Quanta at his home in Cassis.
- •He co-developed loop quantum gravity in the late 1980s and later proposed a relational interpretation of quantum mechanics.
- •Rovelli’s work emphasizes that reality is observer-relative, challenging intuitions about space as a static stage and time as a linear flow.
- •He is a best-selling author; Seven Brief Lessons on Physics has sold over 2 million copies globally.
- •Rovelli’s background includes 1977 student protests in Bologna and ongoing political engagement; he advocates integrating philosophy into physics and has a new Italian-language book on their intersection.