3

(read by Benedict Cumberbatch)
I am here to say that I did not like this book, Cumberbatch or no Cumberbatch. In fact, my impression is that BC’s manner and quality of voice are not very suitable for a text that demands keeping your eyes open and your mind alert. He has a beautiful voice, but its enchantment prevails over the subject matter. With Benedict’s performance, the non-fiction on quantum physics sounds as if it were a bedtime story, and I know that it can be no less engaging than any thriller. However, the narrative style of this particular book is to blame, too. Perhaps it was somewhat daring of me to take up a scientific audiobook in a foreign language, but still, there are not so many terms or lingo, and I’ve read some works on popular physics before. I was going to listen to this one along with reading Félix J. Palma’s “The Map of Time”, and what I expected was, I believe, some rational ground for science fiction and for everyone’s experience of time rushing away or dragging on, contracting or expanding regardless of clocks and watches. That occurred to be not exactly the author’s intention. Unlike Carl Sagan (God bless him) who makes you wonder, makes you understand (c), Carlo Rovelli deals with only the first part. He tells you things like “it is the most astounding conclusion in contemporary physics” and refers to Planck time only for the impact of its extreme smallness, without really explaining where the amount comes from (luckily I already knew that from Leonard Susskind). Instead of explicating, he keeps repeating counter-intuitive ideas twice and thrice, to be sure that you are duly wondering. So I got more of a contemplative essay than a brain exercise that I sought for. In the abundance of metaphors and similes, inevitable as they may be for describing extrasensory phenomena, I could hardly seize hold of grains of knowledge – or the actual sense of epigraphs by Horace, to tell the truth.