Quotes from Carlo Rovelli

I think that quantum mechanics has revealed three aspects of the nature of things: granularity, indeterminacy, and the relational structure of the world.

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

external perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling 'hallucination' a false perception, we must call external perception 'a confirmed hallucination.

We suddenly remember that it's not the sun that's moving, but the Earth that's spinning and we see with the unhinged eye of the mind our entire planet, and ourselves with it, rotating backwards, away from the sun. We are seeing with "mad eyes" like those of Paul McCartney's Fool on the Hill. The crazed vision that sometimes sees further than our blurry customary eyesight.

What quantum theory describes, then, is the way in which one part of nature manifests itself to any other single part of nature.

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

It describes how every physical object manifests itself to any other physical object.

Or does it mean, as it seems to me, that we must accept the idea that reality is only interaction?

the world is made entirely from quantum fields. These fields do not live *in* spacetime; they live, so to speak, one on top of the other: fields on fields. The space and time that we perceiv in large scale are our blurred and approximage image of one of these quantum fields: the gravitational field (193).

Within the reflections in a glass of water, there is an analogous tumultuous life made up of the activities of a myriad of molecules. Many more than there are living beings on Earth.

Dolay?s?yla olas?l?k, cisimlerin de?i?imiyle ilgili de?ildir. Ba?ka cisimlerle etkile?tiklerinde, cisimlerin özellik alt s?n?flar?n?n de?erlerinin de?i?imiyle ilgilidir.

Things are transformed one into another according to necessity, and render justice to one another according to the order of time. "According to the order of time" (???? ??? ??? ?????? ?????). From

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

due to which the value of one variable implies something about the value of the other.68 This is the meaning of the word "information" that I am using here.

La fisica del XIX e XX secolo si è scontrata con queste domande ed è incappata in qualcosa di inaspettato e sconcertante, assai più del fatto, in fondo marginale, che il tempo passi a velocità diverse in luoghi diversi. La differenza fra passato e futuro - fra causa e effetto, fra memoria e speranza, fra rimorso e intenzione - nelle leggi elementari che descrivono i meccanismi del mondo non c'è.

The story goes that in the dimly lit old halls of Kracow University, an austere professor of physics came out of his study waving around Einstein's article, screaming, "The new Archimedes is born!

It is not against nature to be curious: it is in our nature to be so.

Looking at the sun going down, the eye of Copernicus had seen the world turning. Looking at a glass of still water, the eyes of Boltzmann saw atoms and molecules frenziedly moving

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.

This clarified, here is the point: it is possible to think of quantum physics as a theory of information (in the sense outlined) that systems have about one another.

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

That which makes us specifically human does not signify our separation from nature; it is part of that self-same nature. It's a form that nature has taken here on our planet, in the infinite play of its combinations, through the reciprocal influencing and exchanging of correlations and information among its parts.

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

Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe. Our very soul itself is only one such small example.