Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Possibly a little over-hyped on its appearance, this is an exceptionally clear summary of what most scientists believe is the basis for an understanding of reality. I say believe rather than know advisedly because Rovelli is careful to say what we do not know as well as what we think we know.

The point here is that our current understanding of physical reality is the work of barely a century. Although the achievement is remarkable, we have to be careful of substituting an earlier belief in science (before Einstein) that is now seen as limited with a new belief system.

The new understanding of reality is better than that of the Newtonian era. Both are better than a so-called age of faith that relied on revealed texts and God but it would show more be naive to think that earlier truths had definitively been replaced by a final truth. Mathematics must not be the new God.

The book is quite slight. It is a translation of seven short articles in an Italian newspaper in or just before 2014. The whole thing could be read with reasonable attention in about ninety minutes. Much of the excitement surrounding the book is really testimony to wider ignorance.

The virtue of the book lies in the fact that Rovelli has a gift for simple analogy. The complex mathematics that is constructing our current perception of reality is brought to a level where we can begin mentally to see what he is talking about in very physical imagery.

Perhaps the best chapter in this is the fifth on the granular naure of space which just happens to coincide with Rovelli's own area of interest - the investigation of quantum gravity. But the whole book is worth reading albeit with an edge of scepticism on some potential claims.

For example, he asserts the general physicist view that time has no reality but this apparent consensus makes certain assumptions about the value of mathematical modelling on which Lee Smolin has raised some important questions that might suggest we should not be too accepting.

The final chapter on our place in the universe - which usually allows scientists to offer little more than posturing platitudes - is, in this case, finely tuned and appealing as a humane and 'Lucretian' view of the positive aspects of our being very small in the universe.

Rovelli does, unfortunately, slip into a couple of standard issue species-pessimistic paragraphs with the usual obeisance to climate change (oh, yawn!) but, in this, he is just a creature of his European time. Even Homer may nod. The general tenor of his position is nicely humanistic.

The virtue of this slim volume is that it is likely to shake up a few intellectuals and show them that they are living as much in the past as their counterparts were in late sixteenth century Europe who had not actually understood the implications of Copernicus.

To be honest, although I am reasonably well educated in this area, Rovelli shook me up a little and gave me a better understanding of the latest iteration of reality so that it is impossible to think now, as I did, in a sort of half-baked melange of Newtonianism and relativity.

I now 'get' how space time 'feels' (rather than abstractly 'understand' it). The same with the 'granular' nature of underlying reality. I can also see that we have barely begun to see the cultural, social and political implications of this new world view.

By reminding us of Lucretius and his materialism, Rovelli subtly reminds us of the way his materialism was also embedded in a positive pagan view of the world and one senses that the future world will be pagan again, perhaps, I hope, without the spiritual flummery.

This is where the standard issue intellectual pessimism about the species feels a little out of place. Of course, it is possible we shall be a short-lived species. It is equally possible that we may be the longest lived. Choosing which is the likely outcome is not science but sentiment. show less

This short book brings together a series of essays originally published by physicist Carlo Rovelli in the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. Most of the essays tackle a single idea or topic which is key to modern understandings of physics, such as quantum mechanics or general relativity. Rovelli is mostly a genial writer who aims not to give a very detailed thumbnail sketch of a given topic, but more an impressionistic overview which aims to communicate its scope and importance. His prose has a faintly poetic and elegiac quality which I think helps to make the average reader who knows very little about physics (e.g. me) feel like they've learned more than Rovelli actually succeeds in conveying.

This may be an unfair mark against a book show more which touts its brevity in the title, and which did begin life as a newspaper column. But while Rovelli very consciously works to bring together science and culture here, to show that equations can be as poetic and as creative as a painting or an arabesque, there are hints that he still thinks there's a hierarchy of knowledge:

"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."

As if those stories aren't valuable just because they're interested in exploring a different kind of truth.

As if the male hunter (and of course it's a man) is the Ur example of rational inquiry.

As if narrative isn't how people make sense—to the extent that we can—of the world around us. show less

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli is head of the Quantum Gravity group at Aix-Marseilles University in southern France. His unlikely NY Times best-selling book is a translation of a collection of essays he wrote for the Italian business newspaper, Il Sole24 Ore, in order to bring to laypersons the wonder and beauty of modern science. It eschews all of the mathematics and almost all of the justification for what we think physics tells us about the universe. Rovelli very ambitiously begins with the general theory of relativity and writes an additional chapter each on the topics, in order, of quantum mechanics, cosmology, elementary particles, quantum gravity, the heat of black holes and, finally, to the place of humans in all of this. show more Given the immensity of the subject matter, it does not seem possible that the task can be accomplished in only just over eighty small pages.
That brevity is one of characteristics that have made the book so popular. Another is the fact that Rovelli often uses near-poetry and evocative allusions in his descriptions. Consider what he says about particles:
Even if we observe a small, empty region of space in which there are no atoms, we still detect a minute swarming of these [miniscule moving wavelets]. There is no such thing as a real void, one that is completely empty. Just as the calmest sea looked at closely sways and trembles, however slightly, so the fields that form the world are subject to minute fluctuations, and it is possible to imagine its basic particles have brief and ephemeral existences, continually created and destroyed by these movements.
Descriptions like this can convey the essence of the concept to readers whose own understanding of physics is almost surely Aristotelian. Rovelli has jumped his audience at least two scientific paradigms beyond the knowledge brought by the typical reader, but he does so in a way that is far more comfortable that would be a more scientific explanation.
For my money, I would prefer to be provided with some evidence or logical justification for this strange picture of the world. For me, allure of science, and of physics in particular, is in the voyage more so than the destination. While lots of people consider themselves fans of science, very few are interested in actually learning it. For them, never mind - Rovelli presents a very poetical version of modern physics, appealing to the artist in the reader and stimulating the imagination, but providing none of the evidence in the form of experiments, mathematics, or reason that would connect these seemingly impossible conclusions to their justifications. Seems to me to take most of the fun out of it! One could also argue that his viewpoint of particle physics and cosmology is parochial, giving lots of space to his own specialty, loop quantum gravity, but omitting another forefront viewpoints, including the string theory of particles. show less

Just finished. Not the type of physics I endured in high school ("An object falls at X meters per second into a train traveling at Y miles per hour, what time does it reach Sheboygan?" and so on); the type of physics that sounds like philosophy or religion except that:
A) it doesn't pretend to have all the answers
B) when it DOES have an answer there's generally a formula to back it up, and
C) those who don't agree aren't threatened with hellfire or execution (or both).

Either way, truly mind-bending stuff. Who needs drugs?

“Në rini, Albert Ajnshtajni e kaloi një vit duke u endur kot, pa bërë gjë prej gjëje. Po nuk e çove kohën dëm nuk arrin dot asgjë, gjë që për fat të keq prindërit e adoleshentëve shpesh e harrojnë.



Ndodhej në Pavia. Iu bashkua familjes pas braktisjes së studimeve në Gjermani. Ishte fillimi i shekullit dhe Italia po hidhte hapat e parë të revolucionit industrial. I ati, inxhinier, instalonte centralet e para elektrike në ultësirën padane. Alberti lexonte Kantin dhe kur i shkrepte në kokë ndiqte leksionet në Universitetin e Pavias: për zbavitje, pa qenë i regjistruar dhe pa iu nënshtruar provimeve. Kështu bëhesh me tërë mend shkencëtar.”



“Ekzistojnë kufij, aty ku mësojmë, dhe digjet dëshira show more jonë për dije. Ndodhen në thellësitë më të imëta të indit hapësinor, në origjinën e kozmosit, në natyrën e kohës, në pashmangshmërinë e vrimave të zeza, dhe funksionimin e vetë mendimit tonë. Këtu, në bordin e asaj që dimë, në kontakt me oqeanin e asaj që nuk dimë, vezullojnë misteri i botës, bukuria e botës, dhe na lënë pa frymë”.



I tillë është parakushti i këtyre “leksioneve të shkurtra”, që na prijnë udhë, me transparencë të admirueshme, përmes disa etapave të pashmangshme të revolucionit që tronditi fizikën në shekullin XX dhe vazhdon ta tronditë sot e gjithë ditën; duke filluar nga teoria e relativitetit të përgjithshëm të Ajnshtajnit dhe mekanikës kuantike deri në çështjet e hapura që kanë të bëjnë me arkitekturën e kozmosit, grimcat elementare, gravitetin kuantik, natyrën e kohës dhe të mendjes.” show less

This is a lovely little book which, in a few brief chapters, lays out the basics of modern physics and then goes on to summarize current thought on time, the human mind, and the definition of "I". The examples used to explain complex theories were very effective. In the last chapter, the author waxes philosophical about the past and future of the human species, a summary which mirrored my own thoughts but expressed them more gently and succinctly than I could. "I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in show more existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us."

I have to say I'm very grateful for this book and will probably purchase a copy for myself, something I do very rarely, for reference on the scientific theories and for the poetry of the last chapter. The translators have done a wonderful job of making Dr. Rovelli's prose so effectively available to English speakers. show less

“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. show more This is the nature of science.

The confusion between these two diverse human activities—inventing stories and following traces in order to find something—is the origin of the incomprehension and distrust of science shown by a significant part of our contemporary culture. The separation is a subtle one: the antelope hunted at dawn is not far removed from the antelope deity in that night’s storytelling.

The border is porous. Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains. If we find the antelope, we can eat.” show less