Carlo Rovelli
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As we start a new year, our thoughts turn towards the year ahead with all its plans and resolutions. And yet of course it is irrational to make this complete distinction between December and January; in fact, the more you think about it, the more you realise that everything about time is strangely slippery.
The slippery nature of time is something that preoccupies Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist who has worked in Italy and the United States and who is currently directing the quantum research group at the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille. His books \\u201cSeven Brief Lessons on Physics\\u201d, \\u201cReality is Not What it Seems\\u201d and \\u201cThe Order of Time\\u201d have become international best-sellers, outselling \\u201cFifty Shades of Grey\\u201d.
In Private Passions, Carlo Rovelli talks to Michael Berkeley about how music has helped him think about time, and how memory of the past and expectation of the future come into constant play when we listen to music: \\u201cWe don\\u2019t live in the present, we live a little bit in the future and a little bit in the past \\u2013 we live in a clearing in the forest of time.\\u201d He looks back to his childhood, growing up in Verona, and hearing Vivaldi played every week in the local church. He discusses Philip Glass\\u2019s \\u201cEinstein on the Beach\\u201d, a work he admits he likes particularly for its title. He thinks about how Mozart represents the end of time in his \\u201cDies Irae\\u201d, music he loves to listen to at full volume when his partner is out of the house. Other choices include Schubert, Arvo P\\xe4rt, Beethoven\\u2019s Missa Solemnis and the Bach cantata he discovered as a teenager that still astonishes him.
A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3\\nProduced by Elizabeth Burke
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