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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2016
Carl Sagan once said something like, “When you’re in love you want to tell the whole world about it.” This is true enough and comes across as an obvious fact in this short work by Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS ON PHYSICS is brief but full of colorful insight into the world of the physicist.
Most reviews of a book cover the entire volume but I will not be doing that. Instead, I want to briefly write about the final chapter which Rovelli entitled “Ourselves.” After going through general relativity, quantum mechanics, time, black holes, and much more, Rovelli ties it all together to give us perspective on our place in the universe and it is beautiful. He writes,
“When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah – scrutinizing and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can’t see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science.” (69)
You and I both are part of a long lineage of humans that successfully survived the world by “scrutinizing and deducting from the details of reality.” We honor their lives by continuing that pursuit in the name of knowledge, in the name of science.
But what are we? For thousands of years religious beliefs have made humans something seemingly wholly apart from the rest of the natural world. For the Abrahamic religions, we are made in the image of the divine and are the planet’s domineering taskmasters. But science has shown us that we aren’t different from nature. Rovelli writes, “We are an integral part of nature; we ARE nature, in one of its innumerable and infinitely variable expressions. This is what we have learned from our ever-increasing knowledge of the things of this world.” (76) Many of the very same molecules that make up the rest of the cosmos are within us. We are, in a sense, the universe.
This universe that we embody is seeking to understand itself. The great success of men like Albert Einstein with his theory of general relativity, Neils Bohr with his work in quantum mechanics, and so many more are manifestations of an inquisitive universe. Rovelli’s book seeks to highlight this and celebrate humanity, even if he feels we won’t be long on this planet. (77-78)
Pick this book up on a quiet, rainy day and you will find you have completed it in a very brief period. You will be a better human for it.
Most reviews of a book cover the entire volume but I will not be doing that. Instead, I want to briefly write about the final chapter which Rovelli entitled “Ourselves.” After going through general relativity, quantum mechanics, time, black holes, and much more, Rovelli ties it all together to give us perspective on our place in the universe and it is beautiful. He writes,
“When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah – scrutinizing and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can’t see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science.” (69)
You and I both are part of a long lineage of humans that successfully survived the world by “scrutinizing and deducting from the details of reality.” We honor their lives by continuing that pursuit in the name of knowledge, in the name of science.
But what are we? For thousands of years religious beliefs have made humans something seemingly wholly apart from the rest of the natural world. For the Abrahamic religions, we are made in the image of the divine and are the planet’s domineering taskmasters. But science has shown us that we aren’t different from nature. Rovelli writes, “We are an integral part of nature; we ARE nature, in one of its innumerable and infinitely variable expressions. This is what we have learned from our ever-increasing knowledge of the things of this world.” (76) Many of the very same molecules that make up the rest of the cosmos are within us. We are, in a sense, the universe.
This universe that we embody is seeking to understand itself. The great success of men like Albert Einstein with his theory of general relativity, Neils Bohr with his work in quantum mechanics, and so many more are manifestations of an inquisitive universe. Rovelli’s book seeks to highlight this and celebrate humanity, even if he feels we won’t be long on this planet. (77-78)
Pick this book up on a quiet, rainy day and you will find you have completed it in a very brief period. You will be a better human for it.
