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NY Times, Mar. 23 2016
Review: ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’ Is Long on Knowledge
By DWIGHT GARNER
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
By Carlo Rovelli
Translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre
Illustrated. 86 pages. Riverhead Books. $18
The short and resonant essays in Carlo Rovelli’s “Seven Brief Lessons on
Physics” began as columns in Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian newspaper. Even
better, they appeared in that paper’s culture section, its editors
sensing that its arty readers could use a bit of stretching.
Mr. Rovelli is a theoretical physicist, one of the founders of loop
quantum gravity theory, and he possesses a welcoming prose style. His
columns were a sensation. First gathered into a book in Italy two years
ago, they outsold “Fifty Shades of Grey” in that country. The book has
gone on to be a best seller in several countries including, this month,
the United States.
Of the five words in this book’s title, the second explains its
immediate appeal. If one is going to make one’s head hurt — and some of
the counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics made even Einstein’s
head hurt — short doses have their appeal.
The essays in “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” arrive like shots of
espresso, which you can consume the way the Italians do, quickly and
while standing up. As slim as a volume of poetry, Mr. Rovelli’s book
also has that tantalizing quality that good books of poems have; it
artfully hints at meanings beyond its immediate scope.
The seven lessons are about Einstein’s general theory of relativity,
quantum mechanics, the architecture of the cosmos, elementary particles,
quantum gravity, probability and the heat of black holes and, finally,
how humans fit into this picture. We are stardust, the author reminds
us, impossibly minor players in the pageant of the galaxies, and well on
our way to becoming the agents of our own demise.
Photo
Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times
Mr. Rovelli, who is director of the quantum gravity group at the Centre
de Physique Theorique of Aix-Marseille University in Provence,
understands that the way to reach fickle literature majors (his book is
for “those who know little or nothing about modern science”) is to
appeal to their aesthetic sensibilities.
He compares Einstein’s general theory of relativity — which explains
that the force of gravity, as we perceive it, actually arises from the
curvature of space and time — to Mozart’s “Requiem,” Homer’s “Odyssey,”
the Sistine Chapel and “King Lear” in terms of its soul-expanding
qualities. He reminds us that the word “quark” was plucked, by the
American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, from a seemingly meaningless word
in a nonsensical phrase in “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”
He is at his best, however, when spanking those same literature majors
for their condescension toward higher mathematics. Stories matter;
knowledge matters more.
“When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space,” he writes,
“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.” You might tell a great campfire story about an
antelope, he comments. Knowing how to track and kill one is more
relevant to survival.
“Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth,” Mr. Rovelli says.
“But the value of knowledge remains. If we can find the antelope, we can
eat.” His book politely suggests that anyone who is not interested in
modern physics cannot be an entirely serious human being.
Once you have opened this book’s pod bay doors, as Hal is asked to do in
“2001: A Space Odyssey,” you confront a world in which, as Mr. Rovelli
puts it, “space is granular, time does not exist, and things are
nowhere.” This information shouldn’t be estranging, he writes. It should
jump-start curiosity.
“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,” he writes. “Every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a
deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.”
Curiosities do abound here. While explaining quantum theory and the big
bang, for example, Mr. Rovelli prints a drawing of a V-shaped series of
bubbles that seems to show the arc of a tennis ball taking a single bounce.
About this drawing, he writes: “Our world may have actually been born
from a preceding universe that contracted under its own weight until it
was squeezed into a tiny space before ‘bouncing’ out and beginning to
re-expand, thus becoming the expanding universe that we observe around
us.” In other words, we may be in a rebound relationship with the matter
around us.
It’s an oddly cheerful image on the page. The fearful aspects of “Seven
Brief Lessons on Physics” arrive in its final chapter. The author is
withering about humanity’s unwillingness to confront global warming.
“I believe that our species will not last long,” he declares. “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
been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All our
cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage.”
Mr. Rovelli, in this translation from the Italian by Simon Carnell and
Erica Segre, imparts a sense that we may have begun to wave farewell,
and his book is a roll call of the scientists who have taken us so far,
from Einstein and Niels Bohr through Werner Heisenberg and Stephen Hawking.
Like us and everything else in our universe, they emerged from one
small, dense hot cloud. These men’s intellects simply burned a bit
brighter. The lessons in Mr. Rovelli’s book, as elegiac as they are
incisive, do them justice.
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