Quotes from Carlo Rovelli

entropy, as Boltzmann fully understood, is nothing other than the number of microscopic states that our blurred vision of the world fails to distinguish.

Only where there is heat is there a distinction between past and future. Thoughts, for instance, unfold from the past to the future, not vice versa—and, in fact, thinking produces heat in our heads. . . .

To trust immediate intuitions rather than collective examination that is rational, careful, and intelligent is not wisdom: it is the presumption of an old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any different from the one that he has always known.

We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this inmense, chaotic universe.

There is so much space up there that it is childish to think that in a peripheral corner of an ordinary galaxy there should be something uniquely special. 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.

The only truly infinite thing is our ignorance.

La confusione fra queste due diverse attività umane, inventare racconti e seguire tracce per trovare qualcosa, è l'origine dell'incomprensione e della diffidenza per la scienza di una parte della cultura contemporanea.

A handful of elementary ingredients that act like bricks in a gigantic Lego set, and with which the entire material reality surrounding us is constructed. The nature of these particles, and the way they move, is described by quantum mechanics.

The world described by the theory is thus further distanced from the one with which we are familiar. There is no longer space that "contains" the world, and there is no longer time "in which" events occur. There are only elementary processes wherein quanta of space and matter continually interact with one another.

In the big picture of contemporary science, there are many things that we do not understand, and one of the things that we understand least about is ourselves.

Noi siamo fatti della stessa polvere di stelle di cui sono fatte le cose e sia quando siamo immersi nel dolore sia quando ridiamo e risplende la gioia non facciamo che essere quello che non possiamo che essere: parte del nostro mondo.

We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time -in our finite time- to savoring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence.

It is characteristic of genius to be aware of the limitations of its own findings

Planets circle around the sun, and things fall, because space around them is curved.

The origin of time may be similar to that of heat: it comes from averages of many microscopic variables. Let's see this in detail.

first theory of relativity (known today as "special relativity"), the theory that elucidates how time does not pass identically for everyone:

A novel image of the world is taking shape: a world without space and without time. The space where the world "inhabits" and the time "along which" things evolve might soon disappear from our fundamental description of the physical world, in the same manner in which notions such as "the centre of the universe" have disappeared in the past.

When we say that the volume of a room is, for example, one hundred cubic meters, we are in effect counting the grains of space-the "quanta of the gravitational field"-that it contains. In a room, this number has more than one hundred digits. When we say that the area of this page is forty-five square inches, we are actually counting the number of links in the web, or loops, that traverse the page. Across the page of this book, there is a number of quanta with more or less seventy digits.

ogni volta che come nazione, come gruppo, come continente, o come religione, ripieghiamo in noi stessi nella celebrazione della nostra specifica identità, non stiamo facendo altro che celebrare i nostri limiti e cantare la nostra stupidità. Ogni volta che si apriamo alla diversità e ascoltiamo ciò che è diverso da noi, stiamo contribuendo all'arricchimento e all'intelligenza della razza umana. ...

It is always heat and only heat that distinguishes the past from the future.

There are absolute masterpieces that move us intensely: Mozart's Requiem, Homer's Odyssey, the Sistine Chapel, King Lear. To fully appreciate their brilliance may require a long apprenticeship, but the reward is sheer beauty--and not only this, but the opening of our eyes to a new perspective upon the world. Einstein's jewel, the general theory of relativity, is a masterpiece of this order.

To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves.

To the very last, the desire to debate, to understand more. To the very last, doubt. This permanent doubt, the deep source of science.

Le cose si trasformano l'una nell'altra secondo necessità e si rendono giustizia secondo l'ordine del tempo.