A Brief Book Review of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
I really enjoyed this book by the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2014). On its surface, it is an explanation of gravity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, and other topics. But a few layers below, at its heart, it is a love letter to modern physics and the history of scientific thought, debate, and exploration. Rovelli does a great service to the public in wonderfully describing the successes, failures, challenges, opportunities, and ambitions of the field. I think he speaks best for himself, so I’ll share this quote below from the book:
“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. That 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.
“Our knowledge consequently reflects the world. It does this more or less well, but it reflects the world we inhabit. This communication between ourselves and the world is not what distinguishes us from the rest of nature. All things are continually interacting with one another, and in doing so each bears the traces of that with which it has interacted: and in this sense all things continuously exchange information about one another.”