Carlo Rovelli Quotes & Sayings

Clues put us on the right path toward a correct theory. Strong evidence is that which subsequently allows us to trust whether the theory we have built is a good one or not. Without — Carlo Rovelli

Without clues, we search in the wrong directions. Without evidence, a theory is not reliable. — Carlo Rovelli

In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science. The — Carlo Rovelli

The difference between past and future exists only when there is heat. The fundamental phenomenon that distinguishes the future from the past is the fact that heat passes from things that are hotter to things that are colder. So, — Carlo Rovelli

Once again, the world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships. — Carlo Rovelli

The world is complex, and we capture it with different languages, each appropriate to the process that we are describing. — Carlo Rovelli

Change is ubiquitous. Only: elementary processes cannot be ordered along a common succession of instants. At the extremely small scale of the quanta of space, the dance of nature does not develop to the rhythm kept by the baton of a single orchestral conductor: every process dances independently with its neighbours, following its own rhythm. The passing of time is intrinsic to the world, it is born of the world itself, out of the relations between quantum events which are the world and which themselves generate their own time. — Carlo Rovelli

Being aware that we may be wrong is different from claiming that it is senseless to speak of right and wrong. Recognizing diversity and taking seriously ideas that diverge from our own is different from claiming that all ideas are equally worthy. Knowing that a given judgment is born within a complex cultural context and is related to many others does not necessarily imply that we are unable to recognize it is wrong. — Carlo Rovelli

The quanta of gravity, that is, are not in space; they are themselves space. The — Carlo Rovelli

as Lucretius wrote: "our appetite for life is voracious, our thirst for life insatiable — Carlo Rovelli

All things are continually interacting with each other, and in doing so each bears the traces of that with which it has interacted: and in this sense all things continuously exchange information about each other. — Carlo Rovelli

Listening a cultivated person of today that jokes and almost boasts about his scientific ignorance, is as sad as listening a scientist that boasts about not having read any poem. — Carlo Rovelli

we are all born from the same celestial seed; all of us have the same father, from which the earth, the mother who feeds us, receives clear drops of rain, producing from them bright wheat and lush trees, and the human race, and the species of beasts, offering up the foods with which all bodies are nourished, to lead a sweet life and generate offspring — Carlo Rovelli

One hundred thousand years ago our species left Africa, compelled perhaps by precisely this curiosity, learning to look ever farther afield. Flying over Africa by night, I wondered if one of these distant ancestors setting out toward the wide-open spaces of the North could have looked up into the sky and imagined a distant descendant flying up there, pondering on the nature of things, and still driven by his very same curiosity. — Carlo Rovelli

Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider — Carlo Rovelli

due to the limitations of our consciousness we perceive only a blurred vision of the world and live in time. — Carlo Rovelli

Albert [Einstein] was reading Kant and attending occasional lectures at the University of Pavia: for pleasure, without being registered there or having to think about exams. It is thus that serious scientists are made. — Carlo Rovelli

When we seek a sure foundation on which to base decisions about our actions and thoughts, we find that a sure foundation does not exist. We do not even know whether we actually need such a foundation. We continue to make use of vague, uncertain ideas, precisely in those areas that most deeply concern us. What we call "irrational" is the code name for what we don't understand well about ourselves given the limits of our own intelligence. — Carlo Rovelli

I think that the obscurity of the theory is not the fault of quantum mechanics but is rather due to the limited capacity of our imagination. When we try to "see" the quantum world, we are rather like moles used to living underground, to whom someone is trying to describe the Himalayas. Or like the men imprisoned at the back of Plato's cave. — Carlo Rovelli

Is there not perhaps a contradiction between our feeling of freedom and the rigor, as we now understand it, with which things operate in the world? — Carlo Rovelli

If we try to put together what we have learned in the twentieth century about the physical world, the clues point toward something profoundly different from our instinctive understanding of matter, space, and time. — Carlo Rovelli

Time sits at the center of the tangle of problems raised by the intersection of gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics. — Carlo Rovelli

Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking. — Carlo Rovelli

The new coherent picture is not yet available. With all their immense empirical success, G(eneral)R(elativity) and Q(uantum)M(echanics) have left us with an understanding of the physical world which is unclear and badly fragmented. At the foundations of physics there is today confusion and incoherence. — Carlo Rovelli

To trust immediate intuitions rather than collective examination that is rational, careful, and intelligent is not wisdom: it is the presumption of an old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any different from the one that he has always known. As — Carlo Rovelli

What opens our minds and shows the limits of our ideas is an encounter with other people, other cultures, other ideas. — Carlo Rovelli

But this does not imply that we cannot or must not trust our own thinking. To the contrary: our own thinking is the best tool we have for finding our way in this world. Recognizing its limitations does not imply that it is not something to rely upon. If instead we trust in "tradition" more than in our own thinking, for instance, we are only relying on something even more primitive and uncertain than our own thinking. "Tradition" is nothing else than the codified thinking of human beings who lived at times when ignorance was even greater than ours. — Carlo Rovelli

The heat of black holes is like the Rosetta stone of physics, written in a combination of three languages- quantum, gravitational, and thermodynamic- still awaiting decipherment in order to reveal the true nature of time. — Carlo Rovelli

Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity. — Carlo Rovelli

There is a feeling of deep universalism, in the wake of the splendid words of Democritus: "To a wise man, the whole earth is open, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe. — Carlo Rovelli

The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events. — Carlo Rovelli

I think that the resistance against Darwin is not just the difficulty of seeing the power of a spectacularly beautiful explanation: it is the fear of realizing the extraordinary power that such an explanation has in shattering rests of old world views. — Carlo Rovelli

Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippie world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things. The — Carlo Rovelli

Our intuitions have developed on the basis of our limited experience. — Carlo Rovelli

It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy - or in our physics. — Carlo Rovelli

Spacetime is generated by processes in which these spin networks transform into one another, and these processes are described by sums over spinfoams. A — Carlo Rovelli

What does what we know or don't know have to do with the laws that govern the world? — Carlo Rovelli

Rationality and the instinct of collaboration have already given us large regions and long periods of peace and prosperity. Ultimately, they will lead us to a planet without countries, without wars, without patriotism, without religions, without poverty, where we will be able to share the world. Actually, maybe I am not sure I truly believe that I believe this, but I do want to believe that I believe this. — Carlo Rovelli

what does it mean, our being free to make decisions, if our behavior does nothing but follow the predetermined laws of nature? — Carlo Rovelli

When we say that human behaviour is unpredictable, we are right, because it is too complex to be predicted, especially by ourselves. Our intense sensation of internal liberty, as Spinoza acutely saw, comes from the fact that the ideas and images which we have of ourselves are much cruder and sketchier than the detailed complexity of what is happening within us. We are the source of amazement in our own eyes — Carlo Rovelli

Every cubic centimeter of space, and every second that passes, is the result of this dancing foam of extremely small quanta. — Carlo Rovelli

The primal substance of our thoughts is an extremely rich gathering of information that's accumulated, exchanged, and continually elaborated. Even — Carlo Rovelli

Human beings often cling to their certainties for fear that their opinions will be proven false. But a certainty that cannot be called into question is not a certainty. Solid certainties are those that survive questioning. In order to accept questioning as the foundation for our voyage toward knowledge, we must be humble enough to accept that today's truth may become tomorrow's falsehood. — Carlo Rovelli

Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe. — Carlo Rovelli

We never really see time. We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time. — Carlo Rovelli

We are all in the depths of a cave, chained by our ignorance, by our prejudices, and our weak senses reveal to us only shadows. If we try to see further, we are confused; we are unaccustomed. But we try. This is science. Scientific — Carlo Rovelli

We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy we are being nothing other than what we can't help but be: a part of our world. — Carlo Rovelli

Science is about reading the world from a gradually widening point of view. — Carlo Rovelli

The confusion between these two diverse human activities - inventing stories and following traces in order to find something - is the origin of the incomprehension and distrust of science shown by a significant part of our contemporary culture. The separation is a subtle one: the antelope hunted at dawn is not far removed from the antelope deity in that night's storytelling. The — Carlo Rovelli

the particles are quanta of quantum fields; light is formed by quanta of a field; space is nothing more than a field, which is also made of quanta; and time emerges from the processes of this same field. In other words, the world is made entirely from quantum fields ( — Carlo Rovelli

When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah - scrutinising and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can't see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. That is the nature of science. — Carlo Rovelli

It is not against nature to be curious: it is our nature to be so. — Carlo Rovelli

The present is like the flatness of Earth: an illusion. We — Carlo Rovelli

The "present" does not exist in an objective sense any more than "here" exists objectively, but the microscopic interactions within the world prompt the emergence of temporal phenomena within a system (for instance, ourselves) that interacts only through the medium of a myriad of variables. Our — Carlo Rovelli

We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization. — Carlo Rovelli

Nature is behaving with us like that elderly rabbi to whom two men went in order to settle a dispute. Having listened to the first, the rabbi says: "You are in the right." The second insists on being heard. The rabbi listens to him and says: "You're also right." Having overheard from the next room, the rabbi's wife then calls out, "But they can't both be in the right!" The rabbi reflects and nods before concluding: "And you're right too." A — Carlo Rovelli

I worry that free imagination is overvalued, and I think this carries risks. — Carlo Rovelli

A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century. — Carlo Rovelli

we have realized that it is our immediate intuitions that are imprecise: — Carlo Rovelli

Don't trust your teachers. — Carlo Rovelli

Einstein's 1905 paper came out and suddenly changed people's thinking about space-time. We're again in the middle of something like that. When the dust settles, time - whatever it may be - could turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein could imagine. — Carlo Rovelli

An idea was needed, a great idea, a grand vision, to grasp the hidden order of the world. Leucippus and Democritus came up with this idea. The idea of Democritus's system is extremely simple: the entire universe is made up of a boundless space in which innumerable atoms run. Space is without limits; has neither an above nor a below; is without a center or a boundary. Atoms have no qualities at all, apart from their shape. They — Carlo Rovelli

Scientific thinking explores and redraws the world, gradually offering us better and better images of it, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its — Carlo Rovelli

What are we, in this boundless and glowing world? — Carlo Rovelli

To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt. — Carlo Rovelli

Here, in the vanguard, beyond the borders of knowledge, science becomes even more beautiful - incandescent in the forge of nascent ideas, of intuitions, of attempts. Of roads taken and then abandoned, of enthusiasms. In the effort to imagine what has not yet been imagined. Twenty — Carlo Rovelli

Quantum mechanics extends this relativity in a radical way: all variable aspects of an object exist only in relation to other objects. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world. — Carlo Rovelli

Because science shows us how to better understand the world, but it also reveals to us just how vast is the extent of what is still not known. The — Carlo Rovelli

Space is a spin network whose nodes represent its elementary grains, and whose links describe their proximity relations. Spacetime — Carlo Rovelli

In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else. — Carlo Rovelli

Einstein did not want to relent on what was for him the key issue: that there was an objective reality independent of whoever interacts with whatever. — Carlo Rovelli

Genius hesitates. — Carlo Rovelli

Compare 'now' with 'here'. 'Here' designates the place where a speaker is: for two different people 'here' points to two different places. Consequently 'here' is a word the meaning of which depends on where it is spoken. The technical term for this kind of utterance is 'indexical'. 'Now' also points to the instant in which the word is uttered and is also classed as 'indexical'. But no one would dream of saying that things 'here' exist, whereas things that are not 'here' do not exist. So then why do we say that things that are 'now' exist and that everything else doesn't? — Carlo Rovelli

Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance. — Carlo Rovelli

The passage of time is internal to the world, is born in the world itself in the relationship between quantum events that comprise the world and are themselves the source of time. The — Carlo Rovelli

Perhaps it is we who have not yet learned to look at it from just the right point of view, one that would reveal its hidden simplicity. — Carlo Rovelli

The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. — Carlo Rovelli

The final section of the book returns to ourselves and asks how it is possible to think about our existence in the light of the strange world described by physics. The — Carlo Rovelli

We not only learn, but we also learn to gradually change our conceptual framework and to adapt it to what we learn. — Carlo Rovelli

It must not be claimed that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement of things. LUCRETIUS, De rerum natura1 — Carlo Rovelli

We are made up of the same atoms and the same light signals as are exchanged between pine trees in the mountains and stars in the galaxies. — Carlo Rovelli

What role do we have as human beings who perceive, make decisions, laugh, and cry, in this great fresco of the world as depicted by contemporary physics? — Carlo Rovelli

Science begins with a vision". — Carlo Rovelli

I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. — Carlo Rovelli

An overly pragmatic attitude is not productive on the long run. — Carlo Rovelli

Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us. — Carlo Rovelli

Within the immense ocean of galaxies and stars we are in a remote corner; amidst the infinite arabesques of forms which constitute reality we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes. — Carlo Rovelli

I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains. — Carlo Rovelli

In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don't get anywhere by not 'wasting' time- something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget. — Carlo Rovelli

We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For — Carlo Rovelli