Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who is the head of the Quantum Gravity group at Aix-Marseille University in France. He is one of the early proponents of the loop quantum gravity theory and the author of “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.”
As impressive as all of that is, however, don’t let it put you off if you are a lay person like me. While Rovelli admits early on in the book that he wants to make the book satisfying to his colleagues, he wrote it for us.
It is a thoroughly accessible book that is brimming with enthusiasm for the topic, a quality that I have always found pleasing in its own right but essential to giving the reader the strength of curiosity necessary to get through a book about, say, quantum theory.
The story, albeit one of revelation, not fiction, begins in 450BCE, on a boat from Miletus to Abdera. The author introduces us to Anaximander, and takes us all the way up to Stephen Hawking, the current crop of the top theoretical physicists in the world, and beyond, leaving us with a concise but thorough list of that which we still do not know or understand about the reality we live in.
And that, in the end, is one of the defining qualities of this book. The author goes to great lengths to differentiate between established knowledge (i.e. That which has withstood the test of time and observation.), theory, and conjecture.
There are only a handful of equations in the entire book and those can easily be ignored. Rovelli includes them only so that we non-colleagues know they exist and because he, in the most literal sense, finds them to be things of great beauty. (That enthusiasm I talked about.)
He also goes out of his way to avoid the kind of scientific jargon that is hard to digest if you aren’t immersed in it everyday. The language is relatively plain and simple although the concepts may cause you to sit back and think for a minute before you are ready to fully absorb them.
My favorite line in the whole book is, “Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated…” As a writer and armchair philosopher, I have always felt the same way about science and philosophy, which, during the age of Newton, were considered two words to describe the same thing. This is actually a very quantum concept, since the three primary elements of quantum mechanics, or quantum theory, are granularity, indeterminism, and relationality. The world is finite (although very small in many respects), the future can only be defined by probabilities, and everything is definable only in relational context.
I find relationality to be the most critical and relevant in this era of social media and political and cultural division. Individual words, or even sentences, are essentially meaningless without context. We will never understand each other, or agree on anything, if we don’t make the effort to understand the context of who we are and how we got there.
The two pillars of twentieth-century physics are general relativity and quantum mechanics. And while the two “could not be more different from each other”, Rovelli shows that they are complementary, not contradictory, as many of us have been taught. General relativity deals with gravity, space, and time. Quantum theory, on the other hand, deals with some of the challenges to general relativity, such as the concept of infinity, and teaches us to think in terms of processes, not things. (“The theory [quantum theory] does not describe things as they ‘are’; it describes how things ‘occur,’…) In a way, I suppose, it brings general relativity to life.
And what are some of the conclusions? Reality is relational, as noted. The water droplet at the tip of a wave has not been carried from some distant shore. Only the wave has made that journey. “Now doesn’t exist” and nothing is truly infinite. Time, as we have come to think of it, does not exist either. And even the most hardened stone is not motionless. (“The world is not made up of tiny pebbles. It is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation…”) Only heat distinguishes the past from the future, which, of course, we can’t possibly know with certainty. Reality, including us, the homo sapiens, are not atoms. Everything is defined by "the order in which atoms are arranged." (Relationality, in the same way that the alphabet is just symbols until the letters are combined in a certain way to create an epic poem or story.) “Space is no longer different from matter.” And “the gravitational field [which is not fixed, but moves and undulates] is space.”
This is a fascinating book (I read it in one day.) and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand the world around us. It is, in the end, a very optimistic take on the world and its future. And that is certainly something we can all use in the midst of the chaos we currently find ourselves in.
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Reviews with images
Good read... simplistic and interesting
I like that this book takes a historical approach to tracing physics from its beginnings to modern day. I feel it was easier to follow the ideas presented in quantum physics this way. If the author started with Einstein, I would have been completely lost. Starting from antiquity, I was able to grasp complex ideas in their simplicity and also understand why some concepts no longer worked or needed to be expanded upon. The author also includes diagrams that visually explains space, time, fields, and particles, which is helpful because I learn better this way. The only thing I didn't like is that it felt like too much name dropping in the beginning. I got lost trying to remember who was who and most of them felt irrelevant. He did include some equations, but if you're new to this the math will fly way over your head. All in all, this was a good starter book. By the end you will get a better sense of quantum physics in layman's terms. If you so choose to expand your studies, Rovelli included enough information to steer you in the right direction.
Top reviews from other countries
Rainbow
Exciting, deep, informative and a pleasure to read!
Reviewed in Canada on July 9, 2021Mike Walters
The new Einstein of the 21st century.
Reviewed in Brazil on February 1, 2021Olaf van Kooten
It is really not what it seems
Reviewed in the Netherlands on September 29, 2022