A playful, entertaining, and mind-bending introduction to modern physics, Carlo Rovelli offers surprising--and surprisingly easy to grasp--explanations of general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role humans play in this weird and wonderful world.
"Once again, the world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships." -Carlo Rovelli
Well, I have done it again--I have gotten myself sucked back into the creepily irresistible podcast "Snap Judgment Presents: Spooked" season two. For those of you who don't believe in the paranormal, this is the show for you. For those of you who do believe in ghosts, this is the show for you. I'm never really able to connect well with people who are adamantly against the possibility of a spirit world invisible to the naked eye. In my opinion, there are just too many unknowns on this side of eternity to rule anything out with any level of certainty. My hunch is that those reject such a thought of being able to see or communicate with the other side simply do so out of either stubbornness or fear. The thing is, if we deny or reject the possibility that we're not alone because we've never seen one or experienced it for ourselves, then we must deny and reject other things that we do not see or experience ourselves despite strong evidence to the contrary. This is where Seven Brief Lessons on Physics comes into play. I've never seen how an electron behaves or how, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, that space "moves like the surface of the sea" but when scientists drop the math-bomb to cover their bases, I have to concede they know what they're talking about (AND because I really, really suck at Calculus.)
For science nerds who suck at math like me, you have to pick up this quick and fascinating read by Carlo Rovelli on physics. If the word "quantum" freaks you out or makes you feel super inadequate and disappointed you didn't pay more attention in class, Carlo Rovelli's 81 page book is right up your alley. He provides all sorts of great shout-outs to the scientists who have gone before him discovering mind-blowing truths, questioning, doubting and trying to wrap their heads around this ridiculously marvelous and mysterious universe. Did you know that electrons do not always exist? That they "only exist when someone or something watches them, or better, when they are interacting with something else?" Kind of makes me think of all those times when I've felt utterly alone - that maybe those are the times our existence actually is on hold, and that the clock only picks back up when we're interacting with others.
"Electrons, quarks, photons, and gluons are the components of everything that sways in the space around us...They disappear and reappear according to the strange laws of quantum mechanics, where everything that exists is never stable and is nothing but a jump from one interaction to another...Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light, a set of vibrations, a world of happenings, not of things."
From dark matter to life before the big bang (or rather, the "big bounce--perhaps born from a preceding universe that contracted under its own weight") to the flow of time, free will and thermodynamics, if you want to feel like a genius or have your mind blown for a few minutes every day, read some Rovelli.
"Who knows how many and which other extraordinary complexities exist, in forms perhaps impossible for us to imagine, in the endless spaces of the cosmos? There is so much space up there that it is childish to think that in a peripheral corner of an ordinary galaxy there should be something uniquely special. Life of Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe. Our very soul itself is only one such small example."
This short book is quickly becoming one of my favorites. It was informative as it was a deep, sometimes disturbing thinking experience about the nature of all things and happenings of the world around us and within us. I am especially haunted by the last few pages as he predicts that we "will knowingly watch the coming of our species' collective demise." But then a few paragraphs later, I was once again lifted up to the heights of curiosity that made me open the book in the first place:
"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...on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown..."
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