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

by Carlo Rovelli

Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.

This is a second cornerstone of quantum mechanics, its hardest key: the relational aspect of things. Electrons don’t always exist. They exist when they interact. They materialize in a place when they collide with something else.

Quantum mechanics does not describe objects: it describes processes and events that are junction points between processes.

Quantum mechanics prevents a real electron from falling into a nucleus. A quantum repulsion pushes away the electron when it gets too close to the center. Thus, thanks to quantum mechanics, matter is stable. Without it, electrons would fall into nuclei, there would be no atoms, and we would not exist.

With a flight of fancy that seems to anticipate the Enlightenment by millennia, Archimedes rebels against the form of knowledge that insists on there being mysteries that are intrinsically inaccessible to human thought.

Quantum mechanics can be understood as the discovery that information in nature is always finite.

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

The nature of a man is not his internal structure but the network of personal, familial, and social interactions within which he exists. It is these that “make” us, these that guard us. As humans, we are that which others know of us, that which we know of ourselves, and that which others know about our knowledge.