‘There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness’ by Carlo Rovelli
“To hear a cultivated person of today joking almost boastfully that they are completely ignorant about science is as depressing as hearing a scientist bragging that they have never read a poem.” ~ Carlo Rovelli
Topics: Everything!
Author: Carlo Rovelli
Year: 2021
No. pages: 220pp
CONTENTS:
📌 The Brief Summary of the Books (3 sentences)
🧠Why you should read this book?
✏️ My favourite quotes
📚Great books this book refers to.
📌 The Brief Summary of the Books (3 sentences)
Carlo Rovelli is one of the most renowned physicists and inspiring thinkers of our time. This book is a wonderful collection of the essays he wrote for various Italian newspapers. The essays range from Nabokov’s butterflies to conscience of an Octopus and the meaning of atheism.
🧠Why you should read this book?
Why did Sir Isaac Newton spend decades studying alchemy? Is octopus the closest creature that we have on Earth to alien life-form? Which science is closer to Faith? Why did Einstein make so many errors in his calculations? How do we form Ideas?
These are just few topics that Rovelli covers in his essays and if any of those questions intrigued you I believe you will enjoy reading this book. Rovelli is peerless in his skill of communicating complex ideas in just two pages.
For example his essay ‘Dante, Einstein and the Three-Sphere’ is only two and a half pages long. However, Rovelli explained to me Einstein’s theory of Three-Spherical cosmos, gave me a short commentary on Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, and then finished by showing me how Dante ‘predicted’ (for the lack of better word) what Einstein would discover seven centuries later.
But what I enjoyed most of all is Rovelli’s open-mindedness to everything in the world. Whilst some scientists (such as Stephen Hawking whom Rovelli admired) tend to disregard philosophy, poetry and generally everything that is not rooted in the material world - Rovelli finds science and art to be inseparable from each other.
✏️ My favourite quotes
The big dreams founder against the force of daily life.
It is the fantasy of those who rule that nothing will change
Sometimes, like children who are afraid of the dark, we fear in the light of day things as inconsistent as those that the child is afraid of at night. (Rovelli’s quotes Giacomo Leopardi)
To hear a cultivated person of today joking almost boastfully that they are completely ignorant about science is as depressing as hearing a scientist bragging that they have never read a poem.
The culture of today that keeps science and poetry so far apart is essentially foolish, to my way of thinking, because it makes us less able to see the complexity and the beauty of the world as revealed by both.
Science is not characterised by the fact that its theories have proved to be true, but only by the fact that they can be proved to be false. Theories are true only to the extent that they can be proved to be false. Theories are true only to the extent that they have not yet been ‘falsified’. This means that there is nothing that we can know with certainty.
We are limited and mortal, we can learn to accept the limits of our knowledge - but we can still aim to learn and to look for the foundation of this knowledge. It is not certainty. It is reliability.
To construct the new, I have heard it said, it is enough to violate rules and liberate oneself from the dead weight of the past. I don’t think creativity in science works like this. They are born from a deep immersion in contemporary knowledge. From making that knowledge intensely your own, to the point where are you leaving immersed in it.
Intelligence is not about stubborn adherence to your own opinions. It requires readiness to change and even discard those opinions.
My identity comes from my family, which is unique - just as every family is unique - from the groups of friend I had growing up, from the cultural tribe I chose in my youth, from the network of geographically scattered friends made in my adult life. (please have a look at 3rd point in the last section of this post)
The passions of the heart are much stronger than serenity of thought.
Those who are strong are not afraid, do not seek conflict but collaborate instead, and contribute to building a better world, for themselves and others.
Textbooks are often wrong.
‘We need scientists in the world, but not a world of scientists.’ Winston Churchill
📚Great Books It Refers to:
Bruno di Finetti - The Invention of Truth
Aristotle - Protrepticus
Daniel Denett - Content and Consciousness
Peter Godfrey-Smith - Other Minds
Archimedes - The Sand Reckoner
The Creation of Inequality by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus
History by Elsa Morante
The Manuscipt: How the Discovery of a Lost Book Changed the History of European Culture. by Stephen Greenblatt
How Things Are: My Lucretius, My Venus by Piergiorgio Odifreddi
Lucretius by Vittorio Enzo Alfieri
David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds
Naturalism without Mirrors. by Huw Price
The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose
The Paradoxes of Zeno by Vincenzo Fano
Ferdowsi, The Book of Kings
Spinoza’s Ethics
💭 Other Notes, Facts, Podcasts
In the essay on Dante and Einstein, Rovelli mentions the artist Coppo di Marcovaldo, who inspired Dante’s Heaven.
I keep thinking about the idea that it was the invention of agriculture that gave impetus to inequality. Once we began to accumulate things, we started distributing it unequally.
This is such a brief and brilliant description of what forms our identify in his essay ‘National Identity is Toxic’. I love that Rovelli doesn’t deny that we all have some type of national identity: he is Italian and I am Armenian. But what Rovelli says in his essay is that our national identity shouldn’t be our paramount identity, because that’s when it becomes toxic.
We have all heard about phenomenon called Black Holes. I always loved to know where the terms originated from and the term Black hole was coined by John Wheeler
Brilliant interview with Rovelli:
