Carlo Rovelli: Seven Brief Lessons On Physics

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.


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.


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.


We are all born from the same celestial seed; all of us have the same father, from which the earth, the mother who feeds us, receives clear drops of rain, producing from them bright wheat and lush trees, and the human race, and the species of beasts, offering up the foods with which all bodies are nourished, to lead a sweet life and generate offspring.


When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah - scrutinising and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can't see directly but can follow the traces of. 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. That is the nature of science.


Our memory and our consciousness are built on these statistical phenomena. For a hypothetically supersensible being there would be no ‘flowing’ of time: the universe would be a single block of past, present and future. But due to the limitations of our consciousness we only perceive a blurred vision of the world, and live in time. Borrowing words from my Italian editor, ‘what’s non-apparent is much vaster than what’s apparent’. From this limited, blurred focus we get our perception of the passage of time. Is that clear? No, it isn’t. There is so much still to be understood.


Illusion or not, what explains the fact that for us time ‘runs’, ‘flows’, ‘passes’? The passage of time is obvious to us all: our thoughts and our speech exist in time; the very structure of our language requires time – a thing ‘is’ or ‘was’ or ‘will be’. It is possible to imagine a world without colours, without matter, even without space, but it’s difficult to imagine one without time. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger emphasized our ‘dwelling in time’. Is it possible that the flow of time which Heidegger treats as primal is absent from descriptions of the world?


I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. 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 which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us. For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. 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.

As we know more or less well how to deal with our individual mortality, so we will deal with the collapse of our civilization. It is not so different. And it’s certainly not the first time that this will have happened. The Maya and Cretans, amongst many others, have already experienced this. We are born and die as the stars are born and die, both individually and collectively. This is our reality. Life is precious to us because it is ephemeral. And as Lucretius wrote: ‘our appetite for life is voracious, our thirst for life insatiable’ (De rerum natura, III, 1084). But immersed in this nature which made us and which directs us, we are not homeless beings suspended between two worlds, parts of but only partly belonging to nature, with a longing for something else. No: we are home.