Quotes from Carlo Rovelli

The sun bends space around itself, and Earth does not turn around it because of a mysterious force but because it is racing directly in a space that inclines, like a marble that rolls in a funnel. There are no mysterious forces generated at the center of the funnel; it is the curved nature of the walls that causes the marble to roll. Planets circle around the sun, and things fall, because space curves.

And hence this is what time is: it is entirely in the present, in our minds, as memory and as anticipation.

That is, there is no meaning to the velocity of an object by itself: the only velocity that exists is the velocity of an object with respect to another object.

Se non si perde tempo non si arriva da nessuna parte, cosa che i genitori degli adolescenti purtroppo dimenticano spesso.

The key fact that Einstein understood is that this quarter of an hour is inevitable: there is no way of reducing it. It is woven into the texture of the events of space and of time: we cannot abbreviate it, any more than we can send a letter to the past.

It is with respect to that physical system to which we belong—due to the peculiar way in which it interacts with the rest of the world, thanks to the fact that it allows traces and because we, as physical entities, consist of memory and anticipation—that the perspective of time opens up for us, like our small, lit clearing.

the incessant happening that wearies the world is not ordered along a time line, is not measured by a gigantic ticktocking. It does not even form a four-dimensional geometry. It is a boundless and disorderly network of quantum events. The world is more like Naples than Singapore.

Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.

It's suffering because we must lose what we have and are attached to. Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.

Quando Einstein muore, Bohr, il suo grandissimo rivale, ha parole di commovente ammirazione. Quando pochi anni dopo muore Bohr, qualcuno prende una fotografia della lavagna nel suo studio: c'è un disegno. Rappresenta la «scatola piena di luce» dell'esperimento mentale di Einstein. Fino all'ultimo, la voglia di confrontarsi e capire di più. Fino all'ultimo, il dubbio.

Everything is still confused, and there is a very great deal that remains to be understood.

Because it is nothing but a fleeting structure of the world, an ephemeral fluctuation in the happening of the world, that which is capable of giving rise to what we are: beings made of time. That to which we owe our being, giving us the precious gift of our very existence, allowing us to create the fleeting illusion of permanence that is the origin of all our suffering.

In un caso e nell'altro, il premio è la bellezza, e occhi nuovi per vedere il mondo.

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?

is Entropy, not Energy, that Drives the World

They are prompted by the experience of life itself. Fragile, brief, full of illusions.

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

The passing of time is intrinsic to the world; it is born of the world itself, out of the relations between quantum events that are the world, and that themselves generate their own time.

Ever since we discovered that the Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us: every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

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

Physical space is the fabric resulting from the ceaseless swarming of this web of relations. The lines themselves are nowhere-they are not in a place but rather create places through their interactions. Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity.

The present is a localized rather than a global phenomenon.

With a great deal of effort, seeking help from friends better versed in mathematics than himself, Einstein learns Riemann's math—and writes an equation where R is proportional to the energy of matter. In words: spacetime curves more where there is matter. That is it.

At the most fundamental level that we currently know of, therefore, there is little that resembles time as we experience it.