132. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Carlo Rovelli
Genre: Non-Fiction, Science
86 pages, published March 1, 2016
Reading Format: Book
Summary
In seven brief lessons, Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli guides readers with through the most transformative physics breakthroughs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This entertaining introduction to modern physics explains general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role of humans in the strange world Rovelli describes. “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world,” Rovelli writes. “And it’s breathtaking.”
Quotes
“We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy we are being nothing other than what we can’t help but be: a part of our world.”
“Genius hesitates.”
“The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.”
“we are all born from the same celestial seed; all of us have the same father, from which the earth, the mother who feeds us, receives clear drops of rain, producing from them bright wheat and lush trees, and the human race, and the species of beasts, offering up the foods with which all bodies are nourished, to lead a sweet life and generate offspring”
“In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don’t get anywhere by not ‘wasting’ time- something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.”
“A university student attending lectures on general relativity in the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.”
“Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippie world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things.”
“Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home. This strange, multicoloured and astonishing world which we explore – where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere – is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling. About the stuff of which we ourselves are made.”
“All things are continually interacting with each other, 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 each other.”
“It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy – or in our physics.”
“Human beings often cling to their certainties for fear that their opinions will be proven false. But a certainty that cannot be called into question is not a certainty. Solid certainties are those that survive questioning. In order to accept questioning as the foundation for our voyage toward knowledge, we must be humble enough to accept that today’s truth may become tomorrow’s falsehood.”
“Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe.”
My Take
In Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Rovelli explores smallness (exploring the nature of matter at the subatomic level) and largeness (discussing the shape of the universe and the potential for other universes), the kind of topics that may make your head hurt if you think about them too much. To his credit, my head didn’t hurt as I was reading Rovelli’s fascinating book. He is an entertaining writer who has a lot of very interesting ideas to convey in just 86 pages.
