I was thrilled when my daughter asked for a telescope for Christmas. As we looked up at the constellation of stars that form the Seven Sisters one freezing evening in January, we had an excited discussion about what it meant that the specks of light in the viewfinder were 444 light years away. She was only five at the time, so it took a little explanation for her to understand that this meant that the light we were looking at was an image that had been made four centuries ago. However, when she understood this, she was amazed and wanted to know if the stars were “older than the Queen or the dinosaurs”. While we talked on, I wondered whether to reveal to her that the universe is in fact much stranger than our time- travelling images that were created the same year that Europe was being torn apart by the violent religious forces of the Reformation and the first Thanksgiving dinner was held in Newfoundland – though I thought I should perhaps wait until she was a bit older before raising the prospect that there is not really any such thing as time, other than in our imagination. That we are, according to the physicist Carlo Rovelli, ‘beings made of time’. However, assuming that you are slightly older than my daughter, I shall try to explain this to you, and perhaps she will read it herself in a few years from now. In doing so, I hope that you will see that Love is the single force that has the potential to make us feel at home in this fantastically strange universe.

Rovelli's The Order of Time sets one's head spinning as he explains how all that we think that we know about time is almost certainly wrong. As if the subject was not complex enough, the book requires a whole chapter on ‘The inadequacy of grammar’ to discuss time. We are told that to propose that there is such a thing as now or that there is a present in the universe is meaningless: ‘The idea that a well- defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience.’