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

the critical work of a modern historian must take into account all the sources, evaluating their reliability and weighing the relevance of information furnished. The most plausible reconstruction emerges from this practice of evaluation and of weighted integration of the sources.

He was brilliant, the most brilliant—but he also had his limits, like everyone else. I think that the genius of Newton lay precisely in his being aware of these limits: the limits of what he did not know. And this is the basis of the science that he helped to give birth to.

On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium)—one of the most important works in the history of humanity. Thanks to his book, this species of little creatures living on a marginal planet, of a peripheral star, in one of the billions of galaxies in the cosmos, realizes for the first time, with utter astonishment, that they are not the center of the universe.