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

by Carlo Rovelli

Without the notion of fields introduced by Faraday, without the spectacular power of mathematics, without the geometry of Gauss and Riemann, this “certain physics” would have remained incomprehensible. Empowered by new conceptual tools and by mathematics, Einstein writes the equations that describe Democritus’s void and finds for its “certain physics” a colorful and amazing world where universes explode, space collapses into bottomless holes, time slows down in the vicinity of a planet, and the boundless expanses of interstellar space ripple and sway like the surface of the sea. . . . All this sounds like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. And yet, instead, it is a glance toward reality. Or better, a glimpse of reality, a little less veiled than our blurred and banal everyday view of it. A reality that seems to be made of the same stuff our dreams are made of but that is nevertheless more real than our clouded daily dreaming.