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

It is not true, as today we love to repeat, that different cultural worlds are mutually impermeable and untranslatable. The opposite is true: the borders between theories, disciplines, eras, cultures, peoples and individuals are remarkably porous, and our knowledge is fed by the exchanges across this highly permeable spectrum. Our knowledge is the result of a continuous development of this dense web of exchanges. What interests us most is precisely this exchange: to compare, to exchange ideas, to learn and to build

There is no trace of a Newton who would confuse good science with magic, or with untested tradition or authority. The reverse is true; he is the prescient modern scientist who confronts new areas of scientific inquiry clear-sightedly, publishing when he succeeds in arriving at clear and important results, and not publishing when he does not arrive at such results. 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.

What can the university offer us now? It can offer the same riches that Copernicus found: the accumulated knowledge of the past, together with the liberating idea that knowledge can be transformed and become transformative.

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.

The internal tensions between one theory and another, between data and theory, between different components of our knowledge, generate the apparently irresolvable tensions from which the new springs. The new breaks the old rules, but in order to resolve contradictions rather than for the sake of it.

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.

Near to Syracuse there is one of the most beautiful sites in all Italy, the theater at Taormina, overlooking from above the Mediterranean Sea and Mount Etna. In the time of Archimedes, the theater was used to stage plays by Sophocles and Euripides. The Romans adapted it for gladiatorial combat. In other words, the cultural battle between the world of Ecclesiasticus and that of Archimedes saw the complete triumph of the former.

But what I believe really interests us, and the teenagers who are drawn to his work, is not who Lucretius was: it is life itself. How far can we go in understanding our reason? Can it save us from the monsters that dwell in us? Or should we renounce lucidity in order to find consolation? Can we be enchanted by his understanding of reality and at the same time transported by his poetry? Is it possible to seek the light of thought without becoming myopic with regard to the infinite complexity of what is happening in front of us? Is nature a mother, or a wicked stepmother? Does the lucidity of naturalism lead to the desperation of Leopardi? Or to the serenity Lucretius invites us to share? Does understanding make us free?

And it fosters an ethical attitude that is deeply comforting: to understand that we do not exist is something that may free us from attachments and from suffering; it is precisely on account of life’s impermanence, the absence from it of every absolute, that life has meaning.

Because this is the nature of culture: an endless dialogue that enriches us by continuing to feed on experiences, knowledge and, above all, exchanges.

The immediate ideological justification for the outbreak of brutality and violence was the self-styled racial and cultural superiority of the Germanic people, the exaltation of force, a reading of the world in terms of conflict rather than collaboration, and contempt for the “weak.” This is what I thought I would find in Mein Kampf before actually reading it. But Hitler’s book turned out to be something of a surprise, clearly showing as it does what was the real source of all this. Namely, fear. For me this came as a revelation that allowed me to grasp something about the mindset of the political right that I had always struggled to understand. 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. This fear is explicit in Mein Kampf; this feeling of inferiority, this sense of being surrounded by imminent danger.

in order to avoid catastrophes we do not need to defend ourselves against others: we need to fight against our fear of them.

A Germany offended and humiliated by the outcome of the First World War and terrified by the power of France and Russia was a Germany primed for auto-destruction; the Germany that, having learned its lesson and reconstructed itself at the center of European collaboration and resistance to war, is a Germany that has truly flourished.

Time does not pass at the same speed everywhere. All physical phenomena are slower at sea level than in the mountains. Time slows down if I am lower down, where gravity is at its most intense.

Our intuition balks at the immense numbers and the endless variety generated by combinations. Like the king in the Persian story, it seems impossible to us that from the combination of simple things, so many other things and such complexity can be born. It is for this reason, I believe, that it seems inconceivable that things as complex as life, or our own thought, can emerge from simple things: because we instinctively underestimate simple things. We never think they are capable of much. Numbers generated by grains of wheat and a chessboard surely cannot empty all the granaries in the kingdom. And yet they do.

Why, for millennia, have we exchanged gifts at the end of December? Empires have collapsed; entire populations have been slaughtered; we have changed religion several times; we have been rich and poor, dominated and domineering; we have believed in witches and have gone to the moon—and with absolute regularity, at the end of December, we have exchanged small gifts and lit a candle or a small light. Is this not remarkable?

It will pass. All the epidemics of the past have passed. Nobody is yet clear about the effect this will have on our lives, how disruptive it will be, how much it will cost each of us. 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. My secret hope is that this will be our conclusion from the current crisis. Problems are best solved together. Humankind can survive only if we work together.

We are not the masters of the world, we are not immortal; we are, as we have always been, like leaves in the autumn wind. We are not waging a battle against death. That battle we must inevitably lose, as death prevails anyway. 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.