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

by Carlo Rovelli

Our intuitive idea of the present – the ensemble of all events happening ‘now’ in the universe – is an effect of our blindness: our inability to recognize small temporal intervals.

What is a wave, which moves on water without carrying with it any drop of water? A wave is not an object, in the sense that it is not made of matter that travels with it. The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous

There is always, in this world, someone who pretends to tell us the ultimate answers. The world is full of people who say that they have The Truth. Because they have got it from the fathers; they have read it in a Great Book; they have received it directly from a god; they have found it in the depths of themselves. There is always someone who has the presumption to be the depository of Truth, neglecting to notice that the world is full of other depositories of Truth, each one with his own real Truth, different from that of the others. There is always some prophet dressed in white, uttering the words, ‘Follow me, I am the true way.’