Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

by Carlo Rovelli

not as simple and clear as he’d initially thought. Einstein did not want to relent on what was for him the key issue: that there was an objective reality independent of whoever interacts with whatever.

does it mean, as it seems to me, that we must accept the idea that reality is only interaction?

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.

Why does heat go from hot things to cold things, and not vice versa? It is a crucial question, because it relates to the nature of time.

We are nodes in a network of exchanges

We are like an only child who on growing up realizes that the world does not revolve around them alone, as they thought when little. They must learn to be one amongst others. Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are.

If we are special we are only special in the way that everyone feels themselves to be, as every mother is to her child.

This communication between ourselves and the world is not what distinguishes us from the rest of nature. 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.

There is not an ‘I’ and ‘the neurons in my brain’. They are the same thing. An individual is a process: complex, tightly integrated.