Quotes from Carlo Rovelli

Even if we observe a small, empty region of space in which there are no atoms, we still detect a minute swarming of these particles.

the gravitational field is not diffused through space; the gravitational field is that space itself.

Our moral values, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution which our species has undergone over millions of years. Rather, they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real. They are the complex reality of which we are made. Our reality is tears and laughter, gratitude and altruism, loyalty and betrayal, the past which haunts us and serenity.

Time is an effect of our overlooking the physical microstates of things. Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance.

Why do we remember the past and not the future?

Bertrand Russell noted this in a famous article, writing emphatically that "The law of causality . . . is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

The expanded present is the set of events that are neither past nor future: it exists, just as there are human beings who are neither our descendants nor our forebears.

What we call "time" is a complex collection of structures,2 of layers. Under increasing scrutiny, in ever greater depth, time has lost layers one after another, piece by piece. The first part of this book gives an account of this crumbling of time.

If the present has no meaning, then what "exists" in the universe? Is not what "exists" precisely what is here "in the present"?

Even the distinction between present, past, and future thus becomes fluctuating, indeterminate. Just as a particle may be diffused in space, so, too, the differences between past and future may fluctuate: an event may be both before and after another one.

Happy and master of himself is the man who for every day of his life can say: "Today I have lived; tomorrow if God extends for us a horizon of dark clouds or designs a morning of limpid light, he will not change our poor past he will do nothing without the memory of events that the fleeting hour will have assigned to us.

Newton, who resuscitated the Democritean idea of space, had tried to patch things up by arguing that space was God's sensorium. No one has ever understood what Newton meant by 'God's sensorium', perhaps not even Newton himself.

we are nothing but images of images. Reality, including our selves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which . . . there is nothing.

Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall.

Hollandal? felsefeci Baruch Spinoza'n?n 17. yüzy?lda müthi? bir sa?duyuyla anlad??? gibi, bu ikisi ayn? ?eydir. "Ben" ve "beynimdeki nöronlar" diye iki ayr? ?ey yoktur. Bu ikisi ayn?d?r. Bir birey, karma??k ama s?k? s?k?ya bütünle?ik bir süreçtir.

The central point is rebellion against the renunciation of the desire to know. A declaration of faith in the comprehensibility of the world, a proud retaliation to those who remain satisfied with their own ignorance, who call "infinite" that which we don't understand and delegate knowledge elsewhere.

Quantum gravity is the discovery that no infinitely small point exists. There is a lower limit to the divisibility of space.

Only someone in his twenties can take such delirious propositions seriously. You have to be a twentysomething to believe that they can be turned into a theory of the world.

Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.

The Einstein who makes more errors than anyone else is precisely the same Einstein who succeeds in understanding more about nature than anyone else.

The difference between past and future only exists when there is heat.

El pensamiento científico se nutre de la capacidad de ver las cosas de manera distinta de cómo las veíamos antes

The "quantum leaps" from one orbit to another constitute their way of being real: an electron is a combination of leaps from one interaction to another.

Thus, it is possible to measure time by simply counting the oscillations of a pendulum. It seems such an obvious idea, but it took Galileo to find it; it had not occurred to anyone before him. So it goes, with science.