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

They are like brief diary entries recording the intellectual adventures of a physicist who is interested in many things and who is searching for new ideas—for a wide but coherent perspective.

The essence of the theory is the idea that, in the absence of other influences, every object moves toward its “natural place”: lower down for earth, a little higher for water, higher again for air, and higher still for fire; the speed of “natural movement” increases with weight and decreases according to the density of the medium in which the object is immersed.

We are all siblings on this planet. And this is a fact, of the same order of certainty as that the Earth is round.

It is like asking why there are doors attached to handles. There can be no reason for attaching a door to a handle. But there is good reason for attaching a handle to a door. Living things do not possess appropriate structures for mysterious reasons: it is only those that have appropriate structures that are living in the first place.

There is no such thing as intentionality in nature. It isn’t design that directs the combination of

things, but it is the combination of things that gave rise to intentionality.

He was convinced that it was foolish to defend the idea that whoever wrote Genesis

had even the slightest understanding of cosmology.

They are Hadza, a population of hunter-gatherers. They live in a region of northern

Tanzania. There are not many of them left. The migrations of Masai cattle-herders, and then the encroachment of the modern world, have significantly diminished their territory.

The environment here is good, and Africa is like this, he says with a smile: always disastrous, but always elated.

But festivities at the end of December are a great deal older

and deeper than Christianity, which appropriated them, embedding its own mythology and theology there and displacing other traditions. Traces survive, transformed: in ancient Rome it was customary to light candles and to exchange presents toward the end of December, long before the birth of Christ. The pagan tribes of the north celebrated the winter solstice long before

the Christian message reached them. The force that compels our behavior toward the end of the year is more ancient than Chri...

Our splendid intelligence surrenders to a small virus that is little more than a speck of dust. Science is the best tool we have found, let’s hold it dear; but we remain fragile when faced with a powerful and indifferent nature.

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.