HackerTube.dev

The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli

The Royal Institution · 1.4M views · 2018-06-13 · 54:54

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

Physicist Carlo Rovelli gives a public lecture at the Royal Institution on how our understanding of time has changed, from Boltzmann and Einstein to quantum theory and loop quantum gravity. He blends physics, philosophy and art to argue that time is stranger than everyday intuition suggests.

On Hacker News

HN commenters point to it as a lucid, general-audience lecture that shows how wrong common conceptions of time are, often in threads on entropy and the arrow of time.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 6 months · HN mentions 2018–2022

Topics

Fundamental physicsQuantum physicsPhysics & space (other)
Search by tags
timeentropyloop quantum gravityarrow of timephilosophy of physics

What people said

crispyambulance · 2022-05 · Strong recommendation

Rovelli is an astounding communicator. Here's a wonderful lecture he did for the Royal Institute on the nature of Time: [VIDEO] His communication style is a model of lucidity and kindness that more specialists should emulate when talking or writing to general audiences.

Read the original HN comment ↗
danbruc · 2019-09 · Strong recommendation

Our conception of time is just totally wrong, or at least this is true for 99.9 % of all humans and that is certainly an underestimate. Something like THE time does not exist, we are just all living together in a small bubble in the universe, all of us experiencing more or less the same gravitational field, all of us moving together at more or less the same speed as Earth moves through space, and that is what makes it look like there is THE time. But actually time is more like counting the calories you burn as you walk through the world, it is specific to you and the path you take. There is a great lecture »The Physics and Philosophy of Time« by Carlo Rovelli [1] aimed at the general public that does a good job pointing out how wrong we are. [1] [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗
kergonath · 2020-08 · Recommendation

We don’t have an answer to this question. I don’t want to discuss metaphysics here, but there is a very interesting discussion on that subject here: [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by The Royal Institution, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks
  • SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
  • Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources