There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness

by Carlo Rovelli

It was a dream of building a world where there would be no huge social inequalities, no male domination of women: a place without borders, without armies, without poverty. It was the idea of replacing all competitive struggle for power with cooperation, of leaving behind the bigotries, fascisms, nationalisms, the narrow identitarianism that had led the preceding generations to exterminate 100 million human beings in two world wars. These were far-reaching dreams, envisaging a world without private property, without envy or jealousy, without hierarchy, without churches, without powerful states, without atomistic closed family units, without dogma. A world, in a word, that was free. Somewhere with no need for the excesses of consumerism, where you could work for pleasure, not for getting, spending or social climbing.

communicate the experiences and feelings of human beings in all their variety, affording us glimpses of the boundless vastness of humanity.

He is describing a ‘three-sphere’, the shape that in 1917 Albert Einstein hypothesized was the shape of our universe, and that today remains compatible with the most recent astronomical measurements.

If we start out from the South Pole and head north, at a certain point we will cross the equator: in our representation of the surface of our planet in two discs, we ‘leap’ from one disc to the next. Obviously, in reality, no such leap occurs, because the northern hemisphere seen by someone coming from the south ‘surrounds’ the southern hemisphere, just as the southern hemisphere ‘surrounds’ the northern hemisphere for anyone looking from the north.

To hear a cultivated person of today joking almost boastfully that they are completely ignorant about science is as depressing as hearing a scientist bragging that they have never read a poem.

Poetry and science are both manifestations of the spirit that creates new ways of thinking the world, in order to understand it better. Great science and great poetry are both visionary, and sometimes may arrive at the same insights. The culture of today that keeps science and poetry so far apart is essentially foolish, to my way of thinking, because it makes us less able to see the complexity and the beauty of the world as revealed by both.

‘There are four hundred tiles on the floor of this room; if I throw one hundred grains of rice into the air, will I find,’ he asked us, ‘five grains on any one tile?’

We would avoid a great deal of foolishness, and society would gain significant advantages, if children were taught the fundamental ideas of probability theory and statistics: in simple form in primary school, and in greater depth in junior and senior.

In this essentially uncertain world, it would be foolish to ask for absolute certainty. Whoever boasts of being certain is usually the least reliable.

Between certainty and complete uncertainty there is a precious intermediate space – and it is in this intermediate space that our lives and our thoughts unfold.

Thomas Bayes. Bayes demonstrated two things. Firstly, that every new piece of empirical evidence modifies the probability of beliefs. Secondly, and crucially, how these modifications lead our beliefs to converge, even if they are different to begin with.

Nature seems to have experimented with the creation of intelligence at least twice: once with our branch of the family, and a second time with the octopus.

It argues that consciousness is not something that does or does not exist: it is something that exists in different degrees and different forms: it is a form taken by the relations between an organism and the world.

One studies, continues to study, studies still, then one day, through study, a strange sensation surfaces: but it can’t be, it can’t be so, there is something that does not work out. At that moment, you are a scientist.

In fact, few scientists have made as many errors as Einstein.

Intelligence is not about stubborn adherence to your own opinions. It requires readiness to change and even discard those opinions.

In order to understand the world, you need to have the courage to experiment with ideas not to fear failure, to constantly revise your opinions, to make them work better.

What’s important is not being right. It’s to try to understand.

And he is aware in fact of how yesterday’s ignorance may be enlightened today, and how today’s knowledge may be revised tomorrow.

One of the most impressive chapters in Maria’s life takes place during the First World War. She sees how X-rays can have a ground-breaking medical application and constructs the first (mobile) radiography units, which she takes to the front. The number of these units is rapidly increased, and it is estimated that a million soldiers were treated with the benefit of these units during the war, saving thousands of lives.

The removal of the crucial phrases, and the misplaced attribution of the major discovery, was the sole responsibility of … Georges Lemaître himself. In a handwritten letter to the editor, he points out that Hubble’s data was superior to what was available to himself, and that therefore there was no reason to refer to less precise data that had now been superseded. In other words, Lemaître was uninterested in taking the credit for the discovery. What mattered to him was not personal recognition but establishing the truth.

They are religions aware of the fact that their real knowledge concerns our inner life, the meaning that we choose to give to our lives, and not the world around us, not the laws governing public affairs, and not our understanding of the physical universe. These are the religions which know that they have nothing to do with cosmology.

Solace and laughter, Sweet offspring of our youthful days, And you, Love, the brother of youth, The bitter sigh of later days, I care nothing for. Not knowing why, I almost flee from them. Virtually solitary and estranged, From this my native place I let the springtime of my life fly by …

His awareness of the ‘infinite vanity of everything’ is one of the most honest afforded by our literature.

‘it is sweet to us to be shipwrecked in this sea’.

Alfieri holds our hand and guides us through verse after verse, pointing out the dazzling beauty of the poem, showing us its secret rhythm, its musical quality, now immense, now intimate, and deciphers in its texture the crepitations of the author’s heart.

For a theoretical physicist such as myself, for an astronomer accustomed to thinking about the endless expanse of more than 100 billion galaxies, each one consisting of more than 100 billion stars, each one with its garland of planets, on one of which we dwell for a brief and fugitive moment, like specks of infinitesimal dust lost in the endlessness of the cosmos, this seems no more than obvious. Every anthropocentrism pales into insignificance in the face of this immensity. This is naturalism.

Nāgārjuna’s thought is based around the idea that nothing has existence in itself. Everything exists only through dependence on something else, in relation to something else.

The reason behind the need to dominate others derives from a terror of being dominated by them. The reason for preferring combat to collaboration is that we fear the strength of others. The reason why we close ourselves into an identity, a group, a Volk, is to create a gang stronger than the other gangs in a relentlessly dog-eat-dog world.

The entire mass of the star is concentrated into the space of a molecule. Here the repulsive quantum force kicks in, and the star immediately rebounds and begins to explode. For the star, only a few hundredths of a second have elapsed. But the dilation of time caused by the enormous gravitational field is so extremely strong that when the matter begins to re-emerge, in the rest of the universe, tens of billions of years have passed.

Trying to figure it out, still, is such a joy.

The research group in which I work, for example, is currently trying to use a possible theory of quantum gravity to calculate what happens to a black hole after being consumed by irradiating Hawking radiation.

A lesson in love for life, in intelligence, and in unquenchable curiosity.

please go to Syria instead and stop the bombs from raining down on innocent people. Go to India and bring food to those who do not have enough to eat. Go to Europe and change the selfish minds of all those who jealously guard their wealth and do not want foreigners around, and go to Africa and give something to the millions of people who live in utter misery.

… In other words, the space of the possible structures of life is still almost completely unexplored, not only by us, but by nature

I hesitate to believe that men can be induced to reflect on all of this with equanimity, so firmly persuaded are they that it is only at the bidding of their minds that their body moves or stays still …

I like talking with friends, trying to help them when they are in trouble. I like talking to plants, and giving them water to drink when they need it. I like being in love. I like to gaze in silence at the sky. I like stars. I have an infinite liking for stars. I do not like those who seek refuge in the arms of religion when they feel lost, when they are suffering; I prefer those who accept that the wind blows, and that whereas the birds have their nests, the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.

Or perhaps I have actually learned something, one small additional thing, about the complexity of being human.

And every Christmas, whether we are fervent Catholics or outright atheists, we go home to see our ageing parents, and exchange presents with our friends. And so the year and the world turns in an orderly fashion: we are reassured that the ties of affection hold us together, we feel at home in the world. We are ready for life to begin again.

Perhaps we will review some assumptions about the free market: even the most strenuous defenders of the total freedom of the market today cry out: ‘The State should help us!’ In times of difficulty, it becomes clear that collaborating is better than competing.

Because this is what we are doing: helping our doctors do what they are capable of doing – buying us days, years, more life. This is not a natural right of ours. It is a privilege that we have gained gradually, through collaboration and accumulated knowledge, thanks to civilization.

What this epidemic is really doing is putting in front of our eyes something that we usually prefer not to look at: the brevity and fragility of our life.

What we are doing is struggling, together, to buy one another more days on Earth. For this short life, despite everything, seems beautiful to us, now more than ever.