Quotes from Carlo Rovelli

what does it mean, our being free to make decisions, if our behavior does nothing but follow the predetermined laws of nature?

When Einstein objected to quantum mechanics by remarking that "God does not play dice," Bohr responded by admonishing him, "Stop telling God what to do." Which means: Nature is richer than our metaphysical prejudices. It has more imagination than we do.

Electrons, quarks, photons, and gluons are the components of everything that sways in the space around us. They are the "elementary particles" studied in particle physics.

Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.

Newton's mechanics, Maxwell's equations, quantum mechanics, and so on, tell us how events happen, not how things are.

Bertrand Russell describes the same idea thus: "the raw material out of which the world is built up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind; it is simply arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations: some arrangements may be called mental, while others may be called physical.

Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance.

There is not an "I" and "the neurons in my brain." They are the same thing.

The entropy of the world in the far past appears very low to us. But this might not reflect the exact state of the world: it might regard the subset of the world' s variables with which we, as physical systems, have interacted. It is with respect to the dramatic blurring produced by our interactions with the world, caused by the small set of macroscopic variables in terms of which we describe the world, that the entropy of the universe was low.

the properties of an object become manifest when this object interacts with others. We cannot separate the properties from these other objects. We cannot attribute them just to a single object. All of the (variable) properties of an object, in the final analysis, are such and exist only with respect to other objects.

think of how many millions of details our eyes see every moment that do not stay in our memory-but one which contains worlds. Boundless worlds. They are those worlds that the young Marcel rediscovers, bewildered, every morning, in the first pages of Remembrances of Things Past, in the vertigo of the moment when consciousness emerges like a bubble from unfathomable depths.

To ask oneself in general what exists or what is real means only to ask how would you like to use a verb and an adjective; it's a grammatical question, not a question about nature. Nature, for its part, is what it is, and we discover it very gradually. If our grammar and our intuition do not readily adapt to what we discover, well, too bad. We must seek to adapt them.

Time opens up our limited access to the world. Time, then, is the form in which we beings, whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight, interact with the world: it is the source of identity.

A lightbulb does not emit continuous light, it emits a hail of evanescent photons. At small scale, there is no continuity, or fixity, in the real world: there are discrete events, interactions, gapped and discrete. Schrödinger had fought tooth and nail against quantum discontinuity, against Bohr's quantum leaps, against Heisenberg's world of matrices: he wanted to defend the image of continuous reality provided by classical intuition.

Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present. Science is the most we know so far about the problems confronting us. It is precisely its openness, the fact that it constantly calls current knowledge into question, which guarantees that the answers it offers are the best so far available: if you find better answers, these new answers become science.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion." Illusion

En el mar inmenso de galaxias y estrellas, somos un apartado rincón infinitesimal; entre los infinitos arabescos de formas que componen lo real, nosotros no somos más que un garabato entre muchos.

A határozatlanság és tudásunk bizonytalansága, amint azzal tudatlanságunk végtelen szakadékaiba letekintve szembesülünk, nem teszi értelmetlenné az életet, épp ellenkez?leg: értékessé teszi.

When Lemaître defends the idea that the universe is expanding, and Einstein does not believe it, one of the two is wrong; the other, right. All of Einstein's results, his fame, his influence on the scientific world, his immense authority, count for nothing. The observations prove him wrong, and it's game over. An obscure Belgian priest is right. It is for this reason that scientific thinking has power.

I don't like to thank God: I like to wake in the morning, look at the sea and thank the wind, the waves, the sky, the fragrance of plants, the life that allows me to exist, the sun that rises.

we have realized that it is our immediate intuitions that are imprecise:

Time, as Aristotle suggested, is the measure of change;

Every day countless people die, and yet those who remain live as if they were immortals.