Carlo Rovelli Quotes (1956-)

“Einstein asked himself a question... how can the sun and the Earth "attract" each other without touching..? ...[H]e imagined that the sun and the Earth each modified the space and time that surrounded them, just as a body in water displaces the water... This modification of the structure of time influences in turn the movement of the bodies, causing them to "fall" toward one another. ...The Earth is a large mass and slows down time in its vicinity. ...If things fall, it is due to this slowing of time. ...Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. ...[H]ere on ...our planet, the movement of things inclines naturally toward where time passes more slowly, as when we run ...into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst... [T]ime passes more slowly for your feet than it does for your head.”

“In Antiquity, Anaximander understood that the sky continues beneath our feet long before ships had circumnavigated the Earth. ...Only one small original fragment of his writings has survived... Things are transformed one into the other according to necessity, and render justice to one another according to the order of time. From one of the crucial, initial moments of natural science there remains nothing but... this appeal to "the order of time."”

“On January 16, 1793, the National Convention in Paris sentenced Louis XVI to death. Among those who took the fatal decision was... Lazare Carnot... [who] had a passion for the great Persian poet Saadi Shirazi... Carnot names his first son after Saadi. Sadi Carnot is thus born out of poetry and rebellion. As a young man, he develops a passion for those steam engines... beginning to transform the world... In 1824, he writes... "Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire," in which he seeks to understand the theoretical basis of... these machines. The little treatise is packed with mistaken assumptions: he imagines that heat is a concrete entity... fluid that produces energy by "falling" from hot things to cold, just as... a waterfall... But it contains a key idea: that steam engines function... because the heat passes from hot to cold.”

“Einstein asked himself a question... how can the sun and the Earth "attract" each other without touching..? ...[H]e imagined that the sun and the Earth each modified the space and time that surrounded them, just as a body in water displaces the water... This modification of the structure of time influences in turn the movement of the bodies, causing them to "fall" toward one another. ...The Earth is a large mass and slows down time in its vicinity. ...If things fall, it is due to this slowing of time. ...Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. ...[H]ere on ...our planet, the movement of things inclines naturally toward where time passes more slowly, as when we run ...into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst... [T]ime passes more slowly for your feet than it does for your head.”

“Sadi’s pamphlet finds its way into the hands of... Rudolf Clausius. It is he who grasps the fundamental issue at stake, formulating a law that was destined to become famous: if nothing else around it changes, heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one. ...[A] ball may fall, but it can also come back up, by rebounding... Heat cannot. This is the only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future. None of the others do. Not Newton's laws governing... mechanics... not the equations for electricity and magnatism... by Maxwell. Not Einstein's on relativistic gravity, nor those of quantum mechanics... by Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Dirac. Not those for elementary particles... by twentieth-century physicists. Not one of these distinguishes... past from... future. If a sequence of events is allowed by these equations, so is the same sequence run backward in time.”

“[I]n "Helgoland" Rovelli explains his "relational" interpretation, in which an electron, say, has properties only when it interacts... When it is not interacting, the electron is devoid of physical properties: no position... velocity... trajectory. ...[T]he electron's properties are real only for the object it's interacting with and not for other objects. ...Rovelli's lyricism may depend on how many other ...accounts of quantum physics one may have read: The more that number, the more "Helgoland" will seem a poem.”

“Seven Brief Lessons in Physics... is a magnificent example of the adage "less is more". Tackling everything from quantum physics and cosmology to particle physics, space-time and black holes in so few words... Rovelli... managed... with aplomb. ...The Order of Time ...is a little more conventional ...the first part covering ...time dilation, the arrow of time, relativity, synchronization and the notion of Planck time... The second part imagines a world without time, while [in] the third Rovelli wonders how we perceive a flow of time in a timeless world. ...[H]e has a deep technical knowledge ...he knows what the hell he’s talking about ...Rovelli can condense complex ideas into beautifully written prose, gently guiding the reader through mind-bending ideas without... cliché or stale metaphors. Anecdotes, history, art, philosophy and culture pepper the text.”

“[W]hile we scientists know how to use [quantum physics]... [w]e don't know what it's telling us about the fundamental nature of reality. It is into that chasm that... Rovelli leaps with his new book Helgoland. ...Rovelli is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists. He is also a lyrical writer whose previous bestsellers have offered beautiful meditations on "the adventure of science." ...What quantum mechanics is teaching us, Rovelli says, is that reality is a vast net of interactions where there are no things, only relationships. ...Helgoland is not... a book to learn quantum mechanics from. ...Rovelli is offering a new way to understand not just the world but our place in it ...”

“With the fate of Schrödinger's cat in the balance and Heisenberg's idea that quantum theory only describes observations, Rovelli inevitably asks the tricky questions: what is observation? What is an observer? ...He is the champion of the "relational" interpretation... [that] quantum theory does not describe the way in which quantum objects manifest themselves to "observers", but... how every physical object manifests itself to every other physical object. The world we observe is... better understood as a web of interactions and relations rather than objects.”

“Rovelli talks about time as a complex collection of layers and then strips away those layers... I find an elegant grandeur in how he relates the worlds of science, philosophy and art. What’s more, scientists and philosophers, going back to ancient times, have weaved a connection between poetry and physics, or, as it was once called, "natural science." ...I can think of no one other than Rovelli who would begin all but one chapter of his nonfiction book with excerpts from the "Odes" of Horace. That single aberrant chapter... quotes Shakespeare’s "Henry IV, Part I." ...Rovelli’s new story of time is elegant and lucidly told, whether he is revealing facts or indulging in romantic-philosophic speculation about the nature of time.”

“The beauty of physics lies in its precise statements, and that is what is essential to convey. Many readers won’t have the background required to distinguish fact from speculation. Words can turn equations into poetry, but elegant language shouldn’t come at the expense of understanding. Rovelli isn’t the first author guilty of such romanticizing... But when deceptively fluid science writing permits misleading interpretations to seep in, I fear that the floodgates open to more dangerous misinformation.”

“Carlo Rovelli... is one of the great scientific explicators of our time. His... Seven Brief Lessons on Physics... remains the world's fastest selling science book. ...The Order of Time and Reality Is Not What It Seems ...illuminated ...Einsteinian relativity, gravitational waves and other ...physics. ...Rovelli's gift is to bring difficult ideas down a level. His books continue a tradition of jargon-free popular scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specializations of the last century.”