Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity

by Carlo Rovelli

We don’t have absolute certainty, and never will have it – unless we accept blind belief.

The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical distrust in certainty.

Not because science pretends to know ultimate answers but precisely for the opposite reason: because the scientific spirit distrusts whoever claims to be the one having ultimate answers, or privileged access to Truth.

Maybe, after all, there is a grain of truth in the joke reported by St Augustine: What was God doing before creating the world? He was preparing Hell for those who seek to scrutinize deep mysteries.2 But these deep mysteries are precisely the ‘depths’ in which Democritus, in the quote that opens this chapter, invites us to seek the truth.

To seek to look further, to go further, seems to me to be one of the splendid things which gives sense to life.

Like loving, or looking at the sky. The curiosity to learn, to discover, to look over the next hill, the desire to taste the apple: these are the things which make us human.

It’s a vast world, with much still to clarify and explore. It’s my fondest dream that someone – one of the younger readers of this book, I hope – will be able to voyage across it and illuminate it better. Beyond the next hill there are worlds still more vast, still to be discovered.