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

by Carlo Rovelli

The greatest physicist of the second half of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman, wrote at the beginning of his wonderful introductory lessons on physics: If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis, or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it, that all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence you will see an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

But centuries dominated by monotheism have not permitted the survival of Democritus’s naturalism. The closure of the ancient schools such as those of Athens and Alexandria and the destruction of all the texts not in accordance with Christian ideas were vast and systematic, at the time of the brutal anti-pagan repression following from the edicts of Emperor Theodosius, which, in 390–1 declared that Christianity was to be the only and obligatory religion of the empire.

he concludes that he thinks they are indeed real, but with ‘the hesitation that is necessary when faced with the deepest questions of science’.