Quotes from Carlo Rovelli

Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same.

We are the products of a long selection process of chemical, biological, and cultural structures that at different levels have interacted for a long time in order to shape the funny process that we are.

The world is like a collection of interrelated points of view.

In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else.

When we say that human behaviour is unpredictable, we are right, because it is too complex to be predicted, especially by ourselves. Our intense sensation of internal liberty, as Spinoza acutely saw, comes from the fact that the ideas and images which we have of ourselves are much cruder and sketchier than the detailed complexity of what is happening within us. We are the source of amazement in our own eyes

A stone is a prototypical "thing": we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an "event." It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.

Probability does not refer to the system as such (the dice, the newspaper editor, the decaying atom, tomorrow's weather), but to the knowledge that I have about this system.

The reason behind the need to dominate others derives from a terror of being dominated by them.

What I see, in other words, is not a reproduction of the external world. It is what I expect, corrected by what I can grasp. The relevant input is not that which confirms what we already know, but that which contradicts our expectations.

An individual is a process: complex, tightly integrated.

The heat of black holes is like the Rosetta stone of physics, written in a combination of three languages- quantum, gravitational, and thermodynamic- still awaiting decipherment in order to reveal the true nature of time.

A moving object therefore experiences a shorter duration than a stationary one: a watch marks fewer seconds, a plant grows more slowly, a young man dreams less. For a moving object, time contracts.

How long is forever?" asks Alice. "Sometimes, just one second," replies the White Rabbit. There are dreams lasting an instant in which everything seems frozen for an eternity.

Quantum theory is of no direct help in understanding the mind.

Those who defend this way of thinking about reality—eternalism—frequently cite Einstein, who in a famous letter writes: For people like us who believe in physics the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

And it seems to me that life, this brief life, is nothing other than this: the incessant cry of these emotions that drive us, that we sometimes attempt to channel in the name of a god, a political faith, in a ritual that reassures us that, fundamentally, everything is in order, in a great and boundless love—and the cry is beautiful. Sometimes it is a cry of pain. Sometimes it is a song.

The notion of "the present" refers to things that are close to us, not to anything that is far away. Our "present" does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us.

None of the pieces that time has lost (singularity, direction, independence, the present, continuity) puts into question the fact that the world is a network of events. On the one hand, there was time, with its many determinations; on the other, the simple fact that nothing is : things happen.

The greatness of literature lies in its capacity to communicate the experiences and feelings of human beings in all their variety, affording us glimpses of the boundless vastness of humanity.

Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity.

if nothing else around it changes, heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one......This is the only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future.

In the awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science. The

The border is porous. Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains. If we find the antelope, we can eat.

Within the immense ocean of galaxies and stars we are in a remote corner; amidst the infinite arabesques of forms which constitute reality we are merely a flourish among innumerably many such flourishes.