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

Galileo did not build his new physics by rebelling against a dogma, or by forgetting Aristotle. On the contrary, having learned deeply from him, he worked out how to modify aspects of the Aristotelian conceptual cathedral: between himself and Aristotle there is not incommensurability but dialogue.

“I am certain that if Aristotle were to return to Earth he would receive me amongst his followers, in virtue of my very few contradictions of his doctrine.”

There is a continuity between the work of historians of today and those of antiquity: principally in that critical spirit that is necessary when gathering and evaluating the traces of the past.

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.

The revolution is quelled. But has it really lost?

I have always thought that the Quakers in the first European communities in America, the apostles of Jesus in Palestine, the first Christians, the young Italians of the Risorgimento, the companions of Che Guevara in Bolivia, even Plato’s pupils in the Academy must have felt a little like we felt.

Was it futile to have dreamed at all?

that Dante’s spatial imagination, so to speak, was medieval and therefore not yet confined by the rigid Newtonian version of physics according to which physical space is Euclidean and infinite.

In this way our knowledge, be it scientific or personal, historical or geographical, can be deeply reliable and rationally well-founded, without the requirement of absolute certainty.

derisory.

To shut one’s eyes to contemporary scientific knowledge, as, alas, some philosophy in some European countries has done, is in my opinion simply ignorant.

As always, there is no better way of understanding ourselves than by comparing ourselves with others.

New ideas do not just fall from the sky. They are born from a deep immersion in contemporary knowledge. From making that knowledge intensely your own, to the point where you are living immersed in it.

national identity is created by the structure of power.

Not because we don’t need a home, but because we have better and more dignified homes outside the grotesque theater of nationalism:

Quantum mechanics cannot be squared with a naive realism, still less with any kind of idealism. So how should we think of it? Nāgārjuna provides a potential model: we can think of interdependence without autonomous essence. In fact, true interdependence—and this is his key argument—requires that

I think it teaches us that in order to avoid catastrophes we do not need to defend ourselves against others: we need to fight against our fear of them.

Time does not pass at the same speed everywhere. All physical phenomena are slower at sea level than in the mountains.

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 reemerge, in the rest of the universe, tens of billions of years have passed.

The closer we get to the speed of light, the greater the effect would be. If we could travel at the very speed of light, time for us would stop. It would stop flowing altogether. But light obviously moves at, well, the speed of light—so for light, time never passes at all. In this sense, light “won’t get bored.”