Like Moby-Dick, there are two books mingled together here: one talks about time, and how physicists today view it. The other, far less organized, is Rovelli’s digressions. He brings in everyone from Aristotle to Heidegger to Buddha, to get their views on time. Unfortunately, these asides are often irrelevant, and smack of an attempt to see in past thinkers’ writings a préfiguration of what modern science has discovered.
But he fails to explain how Heidegger or Aristotle came to their views on time — that is, whether they employed sound reasoning and observation, or just happened to get lucky on one or two topics.