There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World

by Carlo Rovelli

There is also another, more significant factor that explains our blindness to his scientific brilliance: the idea that it is impossible to compare the thought produced by cultural universes so distant from each other as those of Aristotle and of modern physics, and that therefore we should not even try.

Nabokov himself has written: “A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”

“Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason,” Keynes concludes, “he was the last of the magicians.”

I still believe that this world, which seems ever more filled with war, violence, extreme social injustice and bigotry, with nationalistic, racial and regional groups attempting to wall themselves into their own narrow identities and to fight against each other, is not the only world possible. And in this, perhaps I am not alone.

As far as the arts and sciences are concerned, philosophy is completely useless.

The Einstein who makes more errors than anyone else is precisely the same Einstein who succeeds in understanding more about nature than anyone else, and these are complementary and necessary aspects of the same profound intelligence: the audacity of thought, the courage to take risks, the lack of faith in received ideas—including, crucially, one’s own. To have the courage to make mistakes, to change one’s ideas, not once but repeatedly, in order to discover. In order to arrive at understanding. Being right is not the important thing—trying to understand is.

Just as understanding where rain comes from or what causes lightning prompted faith in the existence of Zeus to evaporate, so too the understanding of how life evolved and diversified on Earth has vastly multiplied the number of atheists in the world.

The well-balanced conviction of Lemaître, developed in many of his writings, was that neither science nor religion should attempt to speak of things in areas in which neither has any competence. Religion, according to Lemaître, should concern itself with our soul and with salvation, leaving to science the understanding of nature. He was convinced that it was foolish to defend the idea that whoever wrote Genesis had even the slightest understanding of cosmology. Genesis knows nothing about physics, and physics knows nothing about God.

A main source of the emotions that give power to the right, and above all to the far right, is not the feeling of being strong. It is, on the contrary, the fear of being weak.

I am speechless: there are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness.