Carlo Rovelli Quotes

#1. Is there not perhaps a contradiction between our feeling of freedom and the rigor, as we now understand it, with which things operate in the world?

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#2. The final section of the book returns to ourselves and asks how it is possible to think about our existence in the light of the strange world described by physics. The

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

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#4. 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

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#5. Space is a spin network whose nodes represent its elementary grains, and whose links describe their proximity relations. Spacetime

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#6. The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events.

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#7. The passage of time is internal to the world, is born in the world itself in the relationship between quantum events that comprise the world and are themselves the source of time. The

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#8. We not only learn, but we also learn to gradually change our conceptual framework and to adapt it to what we learn.

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#9. Quantum mechanics extends this relativity in a radical way: all variable aspects of an object exist only in relation to other objects. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.

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#10. due to the limitations of our consciousness we perceive only a blurred vision of the world and live in time.

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#11. Don't trust your teachers.

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#12. Scientific thinking explores and redraws the world, gradually offering us better and better images of it, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its

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

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#14. Clues put us on the right path toward a correct theory. Strong evidence is that which subsequently allows us to trust whether the theory we have built is a good one or not. Without

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#15. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For

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#16. I worry that free imagination is overvalued, and I think this carries risks.

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#17. Albert [Einstein] was reading Kant and attending occasional lectures at the University of Pavia: for pleasure, without being registered there or having to think about exams. It is thus that serious scientists are made.

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#18. Genius hesitates.

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#19. Time sits at the center of the tangle of problems raised by the intersection of gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics.

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#20. Because science shows us how to better understand the world, but it also reveals to us just how vast is the extent of what is still not known. The

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#21. Listening a cultivated person of today that jokes and almost boasts about his scientific ignorance, is as sad as listening a scientist that boasts about not having read any poem.

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#22. Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking.

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#23. I think that the resistance against Darwin is not just the difficulty of seeing the power of a spectacularly beautiful explanation: it is the fear of realizing the extraordinary power that such an explanation has in shattering rests of old world views.

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#24. Without clues, we search in the wrong directions. Without evidence, a theory is not reliable.

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#25. It must not be claimed that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement of things. LUCRETIUS, De rerum natura1

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#26. What are we, in this boundless and glowing world?

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

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#28. The world is complex, and we capture it with different languages, each appropriate to the process that we are describing.

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#29. All things are continually interacting with each other, and in doing so each bears the traces of that with which it has interacted: and in this sense all things continuously exchange information about each other.

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#30. What opens our minds and shows the limits of our ideas is an encounter with other people, other cultures, other ideas.

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#31. Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe.

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#32. The present is like the flatness of Earth: an illusion. We

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#33. An overly pragmatic attitude is not productive on the long run.

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#34. I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains.

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#35. We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy we are being nothing other than what we can't help but be: a part of our world.

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#36. 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.

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

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#38. What role do we have as human beings who perceive, make decisions, laugh, and cry, in this great fresco of the world as depicted by contemporary physics?

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#39. as Lucretius wrote: "our appetite for life is voracious, our thirst for life insatiable

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#40. The difference between past and future exists only when there is heat. The fundamental phenomenon that distinguishes the future from the past is the fact that heat passes from things that are hotter to things that are colder. So,

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#41. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

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#42. If we try to put together what we have learned in the twentieth century about the physical world, the clues point toward something profoundly different from our instinctive understanding of matter, space, and time.

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

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#44. Every cubic centimeter of space, and every second that passes, is the result of this dancing foam of extremely small quanta.

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

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#46. What does what we know or don't know have to do with the laws that govern the world?

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#47. the particles are quanta of quantum fields; light is formed by quanta of a field; space is nothing more than a field, which is also made of quanta; and time emerges from the processes of this same field. In other words, the world is made entirely from quantum fields (

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#48. 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.

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

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#50. 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.

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#51. We are like an only child who in growing up realizes that the world does not revolve only around himself, as he thought when little," Rovelli writes. "Mirrored by others, and by other things, we learn who we are.

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#52. Spacetime is generated by processes in which these spin networks transform into one another, and these processes are described by sums over spinfoams. A

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#53. We are made up of the same atoms and the same light signals as are exchanged between pine trees in the mountains and stars in the galaxies.

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#54. Our intuitions have developed on the basis of our limited experience.

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#55. Here, in the vanguard, beyond the borders of knowledge, science becomes even more beautiful - incandescent in the forge of nascent ideas, of intuitions, of attempts. Of roads taken and then abandoned, of enthusiasms. In the effort to imagine what has not yet been imagined. Twenty

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

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#57. The quanta of gravity, that is, are not in space; they are themselves space. The

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#58. It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy - or in our physics.

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#59. There is a feeling of deep universalism, in the wake of the splendid words of Democritus: "To a wise man, the whole earth is open, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe.

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#60. 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. As

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#61. The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.

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#62. Einstein did not want to relent on what was for him the key issue: that there was an objective reality independent of whoever interacts with whatever.

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

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#64. Once again, the world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships.

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#65. Perhaps it is we who have not yet learned to look at it from just the right point of view, one that would reveal its hidden simplicity.

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#66. We are all in the depths of a cave, chained by our ignorance, by our prejudices, and our weak senses reveal to us only shadows. If we try to see further, we are confused; we are unaccustomed. But we try. This is science. Scientific

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#67. Science begins with a vision".

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#68. Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us.

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#69. The primal substance of our thoughts is an extremely rich gathering of information that's accumulated, exchanged, and continually elaborated. Even

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#70. In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don't get anywhere by not 'wasting' time- something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.

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#71. Einstein's 1905 paper came out and suddenly changed people's thinking about space-time. We're again in the middle of something like that. When the dust settles, time - whatever it may be - could turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein could imagine.

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#72. The "present" does not exist in an objective sense any more than "here" exists objectively, but the microscopic interactions within the world prompt the emergence of temporal phenomena within a system (for instance, ourselves) that interacts only through the medium of a myriad of variables. Our

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