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

by Carlo Rovelli

To “see” is to perceive light, and light is the movement of the Faraday lines. Nothing leaps from one location in space to another without something transporting it. If we see a child playing on the beach, it is only because between him and ourselves there is this lake of vibrating lines that transport his image to us. Is the world not marvelous?

If today we build computers, have advanced molecular chemistry and biology, lasers and semiconductors, it is thanks to quantum mechanics.

Space and time are approximations that emerge at a large scale.

The objective of scientific research is not just to arrive at predictions: it is to understand how the world functions. To construct and develop an image of the world, a conceptual structure to enable us to think about it. Before being technical, science is visionary.

It is always heat and only heat that distinguishes the past from the future.

Time is an effect of our overlooking the physical microstates of things. Time is information we don’t have. Time is our ignorance.

Only by keeping in mind that our beliefs may turn out to be wrong is it possible to free ourselves from wrong ideas, and to learn.

Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us. It is precisely its openness, its constant putting of current knowledge in question, that guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science.