If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
This small book—fewer than 100 pages—contains some large ideas. In a series of translated essays first published in an Italian newspaper, theoretical physicist Rovelli, one of the founders of a popular theory called loop quantum gravity, explains the major concepts of modern physics. His concise and comprehensible writing makes sense of intricate notions such as general relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology and thermodynamics. Rovelli's enthusiastic and poetic descriptions communicate the essence of these topics without getting bogged down in details.
He also comments on the scientific merit of humility, noting that Albert Einstein began an early passage in a seminal paper on the quantization of light with the phrase “It seems to me” and that Charles Darwin introduced some of his great ideas on evolution with the words “I think”—sentiments that Rovelli sums up by observing, “Genius hesitates.
It’s Time to Stand Up for Science
If you enjoyed this article, I’d like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.
I’ve been a Scientific American subscriber since I was 12 years old, and it helped shape the way I look at the world. SciAm always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too.
If you subscribe to Scientific American, you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.
