Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

by Carlo Rovelli

What we see does not cease to astonish us. We realize that we are full of prejudices and that our intuitive image of the world is partial, parochial, inadequate.

If we try to put together what we have learned in the twentieth century about the physical world, the clues point toward something profoundly different from our instinctive understanding of matter, space, and time.

James Maxwell and the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann understood.

What they came to understand is that a hot substance is not one that contains caloric fluid. A hot substance is a substance in which atoms move more quickly.