Quotes from Carlo Rovelli

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 predicting events in the future, toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this immense, chaotic universe.

The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don't know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.

The most credible answers are the ones given by science, because science IS the search for the most credible answers available, not for answers pretending to certainty.

To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.

If things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float, without falling. Here on the surface of our planet, on the other hand, the movement of things inclines naturally toward where time passes more slowly, as when we run down the beach into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst into the waves. Things fall downward because, down there, time is slowed by the Earth.

National identity is a con. It's good for overcoming local interests for the common good, but it is short-sighted and counterproductive when it promotes the interests of a totally artificial group – 'our nation' – above a more ample sense of what the common good consists of.

Science is born from this act of humility: not trusting blindly in our past knowledge and our intuition. Not believing what everyone says. Not having faith in the accumulated knowledge of our fathers and grandfathers. We learn nothing if we think that we already know the essentials, if we assume that they were written in a book or known by the elders of the tribe. The centuries in which people had faith in what they believed were the centuries in which little new was learned.

Things change only in relation to one another. At a fundamental level, there is no time.

We can think of the world as made up of things. Of substances. Of entities. Of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time.

O gentlemen, the time of life is short . . . And if we live, we live to tread on kings. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I (act 5, scene 2)

An elementary structure of the world is emerging, generated by a swarm of quantum events, where time and space do not exist. Quantum fields draw together space, time, matter, and light, exchanging information between one event and another. Reality is a network of granular events; the dynamic that connects them is probabilistic; between one event and another, space, time, matter, and energy melt into a cloud of probability.

Being aware that we may be wrong is different from claiming that it is senseless to speak of right and wrong. Recognizing diversity and taking seriously ideas that diverge from our own is different from claiming that all ideas are equally worthy. Knowing that a given judgment is born within a complex cultural context and is related to many others does not necessarily imply that we are unable to recognize it is wrong.

We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time.

We have a hundred billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in a galaxy, with an even more astronomical number of links and potential combinations through which they can interact. We are not conscious of all of this. "We" are the process formed by this entire intricacy, not just by the little of it of which we are conscious.

Science is about reading the world from a gradually widening point of view.

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

For everything that moves, time passes more slowly.

che significa che siamo liberi di prendere delle decisioni, se il nostro comportamento non fa che seguire le leggi della natura?

Those who criticize the usefulness of philosophy for science, Aristotle has noticed, are not doing science: they are doing philosophy.

I believe that we need to adapt our philosophy to our science, and not our science to our philosophy.

The world, particles, light, energy, space, and time—all of this is nothing but the manifestation of a single type of entity: covariant quantum fields.

A precious miracle that the infinite play of combinations has unlocked for us, allowing us to exist. We may smile now. 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.

Things" in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous

A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.