ESSAY text by CARLO ROVELLI artwork by IZUMI KATO italian author and quantum-gravity physicist carlo rovelli writes about time, history, and the philosophy of science. We started out with the image of time that is familiar to us: something that flows uniformly and equally throughout the universe, in the course of which all things happen. With the idea that there exists throughout the cosmos a present, a “now” that constitutes reality. The past for everyone is fixed, is gone, having already happened. The future is open, yet to be determined. Reality flows from the past, through the present, toward the future — and the evolution of things between past and future is intrinsically asymmetrical. This, we thought, is the basic structure of the world. This familiar picture has fallen apart, has shown itself to be only an approximation of a much more complex reality. A present that is common throughout…