Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

This brief, beautifully written book is not only a clear and profound discussion of the greatest achievements of modern physics, it is also a literary masterpiece. Rovelli's discussion of the great breakthroughs of modern physics covers familiar terrain--Einstein's theories of relativity, the development of quantum physics, and more recent theories that will eventually lead to the long-anticipated final theory-- and does not break new ground. Readers familiar with developments in physics in the 20th and 21st Centuries will find little new here. But what they will find are clear and elegant lessons about the meaning of these breakthroughs and why they matter. Rovelli's essays are among the clearest and most comprehensible summaries of the astonishing breakthroughs in modern physics that any reader will find anywhere. If one wants to acquaint one's self with the most profound breakthroughs in physics, these essays are a great place to start. Rovelli has a gift, a teacher's gift, to explain the most complex ideas in a way that a non-specialist can comprehend while still conveying the enormous consequences of the great ideas he discusses.But beyond being a wonderful discussion of the greatest ideas of science, this little book is above all a literary masterpiece. It is beautifully written, deeply human, and, ultimately, takes science to the level of poetry. Rovelli's essays convey the grandeur of the quest to understand our universe, and, beyond that, they discuss, in beautiful prose, the human significance of this quest. If you love science, and you love literature, do yourself a favor and buy this little book. It is profound, lucid, and deeply moving. It is about the meaning of life itself, and it is wonderful.

Many years ago, I was required to take a physics course. Being what they called a “Bull Major”, this version was called Physics for poets. A rather interesting formula for those who think human have no choice but to see the beauty in the world or its mechanics. That duality is silly. Much later, I would come home from dating (My then date is now The Wife) and watch a televised class in physics. Amazing what a huge budget for animations and demonstrations do to make the subject fascinating.Somewhere along the line I got interested in reading into Quantum physics. All the while clinging to the famous quote to the effect that if you think you understand Quantum, you don’t.And so, to this slim gem of a book. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli. It is a nice companion book for the not even amateur reader like myself and a lovely intro for one barely willing to read its 80 pages. Please read it, it is very nearly poetic and written to the intelligence of the most casual reader.For me, there was little new for about 3 chapters. These were fun because he gave me another way to think about and understand things, I had struggled to take in.Then he steps int what is more nearly poetry than science, and is entirely science. What we are asked to consider is that the universe is driven by probability. The outcome of every interaction is never more than a probability. Enven heat flows one way because that way is the more likely. For that matter, try this for contemplation. Time is (probably) heat flow.The past is gone, the future does not exist yet, but we are all certain of the right now. Why? What does ‘now’ mean? How do you express it as a formula? Great questions. Follow these thoughts where Rovelli takes you then launch out into your own directions.

It’s Not What You ThinkBy Bob GelmsI have two science books that, over the years, have become my favorites, The Elegant Universe and The Field. I have just found a third, Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Keep reading, it’s not what you think.First of all I have to tell you that there isn’t any math in the book. There is one equation that Mr. Rovelli prints just to show you what it looks like. It’s not very famous unless you are already a physicist. In the preface he states, “These lessons were written for those who know little or nothing about modern science. Together they provide a rapid overview of the most fascinating aspects of the great revolution that has occurred in physics in the twentieth and twenty first century…”In the spirit of Mr. Rovelli’s book, physics is the concrete explanation of the magic of the universe. It is the search for the truth about how everything in the universe operates interdependently on a grand scale (galaxies) and on the minute scale (electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, gluons, etc.) This search, at times, has been fraught with the real danger of losing your life. Galileo was almost burned at the stake, commuted to life imprisoned under house arrest, for simply saying that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Scientists in the twentieth century are a little better off.The book is very short. If you have the print version, it’s 81 pages long, with only seven chapters called lessons. It starts at the beginning of the twentieth century with, next to Isaac Newton, the most important physicist in all of history, Albert Einstein. Einstein’s theories are simply and elegantly explained in plain non-scientific language. The culmination of his work is called A General Theory of Relativity, in addition to three or four other papers that were glossed over and initially laughed at.Once the scientific community caught up with Einstein’s brain they were struck dumb with the beauty and simplicity of his vision for the operation of the universe. It has always struck me curious that when he won the Nobel Prize it wasn’t for relativity (E=MC2). It was for one of those glossed over papers on the nature of light. He did all of his work on relativity and the photoelectric effect in 1905, when he was 26 years old. Over the years, he became a towering giant in the history of science while remaining a gentle and kind man.The second lesson covers the exact opposite of Einstein’s theories. Planck, Bohr, and Heisenberg all contributed in some degree to the theory of the littlest “things” in the universe, which came to be called quantum mechanics. It deals with atoms and the particles that make them up, showing how they interact with the ever-changing landscape around and in them. Then all hell broke loose.It seems that the rules and regs that describe perfectly Einstein’s big universe of galaxies, stars, solar systems and planets do not work if you apply those rules and regs to the little world of quantum mechanics. Conversely if you take the rules and regs of the little universe of quantum mechanics and apply them to Einstein’s big universe you will find that they don’t work. WELL. Both theories contradict one another and they shouldn’t because they both work perfectly in their own space and time. The big prize in physics these days is to find the link between the two because it is inherent in both theories that there be something that draws them together. Einstein called it the unified field theory and he tried to find it his whole life. He failed.Lessons One, Two and Seven are the far and away the most interesting and most important in the book. The other essays cover more popular topics like time, black holes, probability, particles, and a lesson called Grains of Space which is a brief explanation of a theory founded by Mr. Rovell, himself a theoretical physicist. In it, he attempts, I think, to reconcile the big with the small worlds of physics. It is called loop quantum gravity and it’s where general relativity meets quantum mechanics.In many ways the most interesting of all the essays is the last one. It’s simply called Ourselves. This is where Mr. Rovelli attempts to equate us, homo sapiens, to the interworking of the universe. We are all made of stardust put together using the immutable laws of nature. Our bodies conform to how the atoms we are made of obey quantum mechanics and the way in which we pass through time and space. It is utterly fascinating. I had an “oh wow” moment.I’d like to close with Mr. Rovelli’s words. “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it’s breathtaking.”

Rovelli’s words arrive in me like weather. Not metaphorical weather, but the real thing: a change in pressure, a lifting of fog, a sudden brightness that makes the contours of the world feel newly edged, newly alive. When I read him, something in my body remembers how to breathe more fully.He speaks of the Big Bang (spoiler: Big Bounce, perhaps?) and the fabric of space, and what he does first is strip away a lie we have told ourselves about science. This is not the continuation of bedtime stories, he says. It is the continuation of dawn. It is the moment when the fire has burned down to embers and someone stands, stretches, and looks at the ground. It is the gaze of our ancestors reading the savannah as scripture, bending close to dust, tracking what cannot be seen by following what has been left behind.That image opens me like a door.Science, in Rovelli’s telling, is not conquest. It is pursuit with humility. It is a practice of attention so refined that it accepts its own fallibility as a condition of truth. We might be wrong. We must be ready to turn. The track may vanish or double back or dissolve into wind. And yet we follow, because the world is legible if we are patient enough to learn its grammar.This is where the joy comes in. Not the brittle joy of certainty, but the feral, durable joy of curiosity that survives disappointment. Rovelli takes the old stories—time as a river, space as a stage, matter as solid and obedient—and he loosens their knots without contempt. He does not smash myth; he composts it. From its decay, something richer grows. A story that fits what we now know, and still leaves room for astonishment.His book is small enough to slip into a pocket. Eighty-one pages. Seven brief lessons, yes, but lessons is too stiff a word. These are wanderings. These are pauses beside strange flowers. These are moments when you stop walking altogether because the ground itself has become interesting.I find myself reading slowly, not because it is difficult, but because it is alive. Each paragraph asks to be lingered with, tasted, carried into the day. I look up from the page and the world feels altered. Time less tyrannical. Space less empty. Knowledge less about possession and more about relationship.I have always known that I am a teacher, though never the kind who stands apart. I am the child in the woods, mud on my knees, who finds a beetle jeweled with green fire or a toad breathing ancient patience and calls out: Come here, come quick, you have to see this. Teaching, for me, has never been about instruction. It has been about contagion. About passing on the spark of wonder before it cools.In Rovelli, I recognize this same impulse. He is not telling us what to think. He is inviting us to kneel beside him in the dust and learn how to look. He trusts that the world, once attended to, will do the teaching itself.There is an ecstasy in that trust. A deep gladness that says we are not finished, not closed, not done discovering who we are or where we live. We are still following tracks at first light, still willing to be surprised, still capable of getting it right—if not forever, then for a while, then again.And when I finish his book, I feel what I always feel after true discovery: the urgent tenderness of wanting to share it. To say, softly but insistently, this is beautiful. This is how we learn. Come with me.

The author expertly, in pretty much, layman’s terms explains the basics of Newtonian Science, Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, their combinations such as Loop Quantum Gravity Theory, and their derivatives. It’s very informative but in some instances hard to understand because of brevity and mathematical attestations.In the last chapter the author ponders life from a philosophical point view using the book’s summary of Physics as a foundation. He determines that we have no free will. The fact that it seems to be the case is only because of the complex structure of our brains akin to the size of the Universe. Also, that there isn’t anything special about our existence. We are a combination of quanta just like anything else in the Universe.It’s surprising that the author conclusively decides this after acknowledging throughout the book that we lack basic knowledge about the structure of the Universe.For example, in the Loop Quantum Gravity Theory we don’t know in which structure are the quanta found that make up the space-time Universe in which we are found. Also, in Thermodynamics, we lack the basic probability knowledge of interaction between two bodies. Also, we don’t have a mathematical formula to specifically define present time.Given this lack of knowledge their is certainly a logical possibility of a Deity behind all of this phenomena.

In the first five lessons of this brief volume the distinguished Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli takes the lay reader on a journey through some major frontiers of contemporary physics and astronomy. Included are Einstein’s general theory of relativity (now over a hundred years old), quantum theory (not much younger), the nature of sub-atomic particles, gravity, and the longstanding but as yet unresolved effort to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics.Even when stripped of their mathematical complexity, these subjects instill a sense of wonderment and awe, especially so in a reader unfamiliar with the intricacies of present day physics and astronomy. With a few exceptions, mainly in lessons six and seven, Rovelli does a competent job of converting the intricate formulae of his profession into intelligible prose.In the sixth lesson, which deals with heat, the gravitational field, and time, Rovelli’s explanatory talent begins to fail him. His account of how time and thermodynamics interact is opaque. “There is a detectable difference between the past and future”, he says, “only when there is a flow of heat”. “The ‘present’ does not exist in an objective sense”, he adds. This sort of abstraction is foreign to normal human experience. Time is traditionally associated with an arrow because it flows in only one direction. To regard it in any other sense requires an extraordinary leap of the imagination, one that Rovelli fails to articulate.Rovelli’s seventh and last chapter would best have been omitted. Here he progresses into fields - metaphysics, philosophy, psychology, among them - beyond his own profession and where he stumbles badly. His stance is that of a hard core physicalist who approaches everything as matter. “That which makes us specifically human”, he writes, “does not signify our separation from nature”.“Free decisions” in this view are the result of interactions among scattered neurons; consciousness is dependent on the way matter is arranged within the brain and body. This is materialism of an all encompassing sort, embracing every state of mind and form of thought: music, art, philosophy, ethics, religion, as well as physics, astronomy, and the pursuit of knowledge itself. All are reducible to a mixture of matter. It is a stance that I find narrow and defensive and one that goes against the grain of everything that we regard as human.

Carlo Rovelli is known for Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM), which says the quantum state of a system is never an absolute, observer-independent property; the system's state is defined relative to some other physical system. RQM is correlations between systems, not as an intrinsic description of “how things are in themselves".Different observers (or systems) (observers are not necessarily conscious) can assign different states and different values to the same system, without any contradiction, because those states are relative to their own interactions. Rovelli removes any special ontological status for “measurement”: a measurement is just a physical interaction between two systems.RQM's relational stance fits Rovelli’s broader picture, where reality is a network of interactions rather than individual separate things.Rovelli's RQM changes Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation by eliminating the privileged role of classical observers. Copenhagen treats wave function collapse as occurring upon interaction with a classical measuring device. RQM views outcomes as relative between any interacting quantum systems without collapse.Rovelli sees RQM as a continuation of the move begun with relativity: just as time and simultaneity became relative, in quantum theory all physical quantities become relational. There are no things. There are relations. The definition of a relation depends on additional relations.The book is very clear, but it could go a bit deeper.The book is barely a book: it uses small pages, large font, and space between lines to stretch it to 79 pages of text. It has about 15,600 words; in a normal paperback, it would be 52 pages. The booklet is so thin that the glue binding breaks and pages are loose.

When I first picked this up, I wanted to do "7 lessons in 7 days". I've always been fascinated by theoretical & quantum physics, mainly because I've been a sci-fi fan for as long as I can remember. My problem though is that I'm terrible at math, and a lot of concepts unfortunately went completely over my head in school - not to mention the bad high school physics grades that essentially killed my desire and confidence to dive deeper into the hard sciences.Carlo Rovelli wrote Seven Brief Lessons on Physics for people like me. I couldn't do my "7 lessons in 7 days" because I literally couldn't put the book down. For the first time in my life I feel like I have a rudimentary grasp on modern physics - and it's exhilarating. This book is beautifully written, verging on poetic at times, especially in its absolutely heart-warming and inspirational final chapter. It's extremely short, but it has a lot of huge concepts packed in it (well, technically most of them are infinitesimal concepts :) ), so I re-read some sections a few times to try and really digest the theories, and make sure I actually understood what I learned.This field of study is highly abstract and still largely theoretical, so it'll naturally be somewhat complex, even in a popular-level treatment such as this. But as Rovelli notes, good science is all about good images and models - he provides plenty of those, so that a bright and inquisitive child, an undereducated, but sharp grandmother, or an average adult layman can dip their feet in the quantum water and have a nice jumping off point for further learning. Remember, physics isn't naturally my thing - I'm a literature and music guy - but with a little reflection on Rovelli's lessons, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and loop quantum gravity have actually begun to make sense to me.I wish this book existed when I was a kid!(copied from my 06/28/18 Goodreads review)

I loved this book as someone without a science background. Esoteric ideas are presented simply and are easy to understand. The book is short enough to distill essential ideas but leaves you wanting to read and learn more. Recommend!

知らない単語が出てくる頻度が少ないそして興味深い洋書を初めて読む人にもおすすめ

A very good summary of the current stage of Physics, with some personal inputs from the author.

La capacità dello scrittore di coinvolgere il lettore in un tema difficile quale può essere la fisica e riflettere sul senso della vita

What an amazing little book! Easy to read, yet covering the very deepest understandings of reality as physics paints it for us. It touches not just on science, but philosophy and probes the deepest notions of who we are and how we perceive and understand the world. As other reviews have noted, the final chapter bears reading multiple times. It is wonderful in its summative and predictive insights. The book is very short and can be read in 'no time' - a pun only to be understood after reading this book. If you are interested in an easily accessible introduction to some of the cutting edge understandings around the nature of cosmology, time, space, gravity, neuroscience, the scientific method and more, then I encourage you to read this book. Wonderfully well written. Highly readable. Drives your innate curiosity to explore further.