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Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity Kindle Edition

by Carlo Rovelli (Author), Simon Carnell (Translator), Erica Segre (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 4,245 ratings

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“The man who makes physics sexy . . . the scientist they’re calling the next Stephen Hawking.” —The Times Magazine

From the New York Times–bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, Helgoland, and Anaximander, a closer look at the mind-bending nature of the universe.

What are the elementary ingredients of the world? Do time and space exist? And what exactly is reality? Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli has spent his life exploring these questions. He tells us how our understanding of reality has changed over the centuries and how physicists think about the structure of the universe today.

In elegant and accessible prose, Rovelli takes us on a wondrous journey from Democritus to Albert Einstein, from Michael Faraday to gravitational waves, and from classical physics to his own work in quantum gravity. As he shows us how the idea of reality has evolved over time, Rovelli offers deeper explanations of the theories he introduced so concisely in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

This book culminates in a lucid overview of quantum gravity, the field of research that explores the quantum nature of space and time, seeking to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity. Rovelli invites us to imagine a marvelous world where space breaks up into tiny grains, time disappears at the smallest scales, and black holes are waiting to explode—a vast universe still largely undiscovered.

Editorial Reviews

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“Some physicists, mind you, not many of them, are physicist-poets. They see the world or, more adequately, physical reality, as a lyrical narrative written in some hidden code that the human mind can decipher. Carlo Rovelli, the Italian physicist and author, is one of them…Rovelli's book is a gem. It's a pleasure to read, full of wonderful analogies and imagery and, last but not least, a celebration of the human spirit.”—NPR Cosmos & Culture

“If your desire to be awestruck by the universe we inhabit needs refreshing, theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli…is up to the task.”—Elle

“[Reality Is Not What It Seems] is simultaneously aimed at the curious layperson while also useful to the modern scientist… Rovelli lets us nibble or gorge ourselves, depending on our appetites, on several scrumptious equations. He doesn’t expect everyone to be a master of the equations or even possess much mathematical acumen, but the equations serve as appetizers for those inclined to get their fill, so to speak.”—Raleigh News & Observer

“With its warm, enthusiastic language and tone, [Seven Brief Lessons on Physics] is also deeply humanistic in approach, using words like elegant and beauty about a subject…that can seem impenetrably dense and abstract…Reality Is Not What It Seems takes much the same approach.”—New York Magazine

“Rovelli writes beautiful prose while walking the reader through the history and concept of 'reality' and what it all means for the yet to be discovered universe and thus our own lives.”—Pasadena Star-News

“Rovelli writes with elegance, clarity and charm. . . . A joy to read, as well as being an intellectual feast.”—New Statesman

“Rovelli offers vast, complex ideas beyond most of our imagining—‘quanta,’ ‘grains of space,’ ‘time and the heat of black holes’—and condenses them into spare, beautiful words that render them newly explicable and moving.”—On Being with Krista Tippett

“Rovelli’s lyrical language, clarity of thought, and passion for science and its history make the title a pleasure to read (albeit slowly), and his diagrams and footnotes will allow readers to understand the material better and tackle a more expert level of insight.”—Booklist

“Rovelli smoothly conveys the differences between belief and proof. . . his excitement is contagious and he delights in the possibilities of human understanding.”—Publishers Weekly

“Science buffs will admire Rovelli's lucid writing…Cutting-edge theoretical physics for a popular audience that obeys the rules (little math, plenty of drawings), but it's not for the faint of heart.”—Kirkus Reviews

“A fascinating adventure into the outer limits of space and into the smallest atom…Rovelli manages to break down complex, proven ideas into smaller, easily assimilated concepts so those with little to no scientific background can understand the fundamental ideas…Rovelli's infectious enthusiasm and excitement for his subject help carry readers over the more difficult aspects, allowing one to let the imagination soar…An exciting description of the evolution of physics takes readers to the edge of human knowledge of the universe.”—Shelf Awareness

“Rovelli draws deep physics into the light with rather greater success... He wears a broad erudition lightly, casually and clearly explaining.”—Read It Forward

About the Author

Carlo Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist, is the head of the Quantum Gravity group at the Centre de Physique Théorique of Aix-Marseille University. He is one of the founders of the loop quantum gravity theory and the author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, an international bestseller translated into over forty languages, and the forthcoming The Order of Time. Rovelli lives in Marseille, France.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION
Walking Along the Shore

We are obsessed with ourselves. We study our history, our psychology, our philosophy, our gods. Much of our knowledge revolves around ourselves, as if we were the most important thing in the universe. I think I like physics because it opens a window through which we can see further. It gives me the sense of fresh air entering the house.

What we see out there through the window is constantly surprising us. We have learned a great deal about the universe. In the course of the centuries, we have come to realize just how very many wrong ideas we had. We thought that Earth was flat, and that it was the still center of our world. That the universe was small, and unchanging. We believed that humans were a breed apart, without kinship to the other animals. We have learned of the existence of quarks, black holes, particles of light, waves of space, and the extraordinary molecular structures in every cell of our bodies. The human race is like a growing child who discovers with amazement that the world consists not just of his bedroom and playground, but that it is vast, and that there are a thousand things to discover, and innumerable ideas quite different from those with which he began. The universe is multiform and boundless, and we continue to stumble upon new aspects of it. The more we learn about the world, the more we are amazed by its variety, beauty, and simplicity.

But the more we discover, the more we understand that what we don’t yet know is greater than what we know. The more powerful our telescopes, the more strange and unexpected are the heavens we see. The closer we look at the minute detail of matter, the more we discover of its profound structure. Today we see almost to the Big Bang, the great explosion from which, fourteen billion years ago, all the galaxies were born—but we have already begun to glimpse something beyond the Big Bang. We have learned that space is curved but already foresee that this same space is woven from vibrating quantum grains.

Our knowledge of the elementary grammar of the world continues to grow. If we try to put together what we have learned about the physical world in the course of the twentieth century, the clues point toward something profoundly different from what we were taught at school. An elementary structure of the world is emerging, generated by a swarm of quantum events, where time and space do not exist. Quantum fields draw together space, time, matter, and light, exchanging information between one event and another. Reality is a network of granular events; the dynamic that connects them is probabilistic; between one event and another, space, time, matter, and energy melt into a cloud of probability.

This strange new world is slowly emerging today from the study of the main open problem in fundamental physics: quantum gravity. The problem of synthesizing what we have learned about the world with the two major discoveries of twentieth-century physics: general relativity and quantum theory. To quantum gravity, and the strange world that this research is unfolding, this book is dedicated.

This book is a live coverage of the ongoing research: what we are learning, what we already know, and what we think we are be- ginning to understand about the elementary nature of things. It starts from the distant origin of some key ideas that we use today to order our understanding of the world and describes the two great discoveries of the twentieth century—Einstein’s general relativity and quantum mechanics—trying to put into focus the core of their physical content. It tells of the picture of the world emerging today from research in quantum gravity, taking into account the latest indications given by nature, such as the confirmation of the cosmological Standard Model obtained from the Planck satellite and the failure at CERN to observe the supersymmetric particles that many expected. And it discusses the consequences of these ideas: the granular structure of space; the disappearance of time at small scale; the physics of the Big Bang; the origin of black hole heat— up to the role of information in the foundation of physics.

In a famous myth related by Plato in the seventh book of The Republic, some men are chained at the bottom of a dark cave and see only shadows cast upon a wall by a fire behind them. They think that this is reality. One of them frees himself, leaves the cave, and discovers the light of the sun and the wider world. At first the light, to which his eyes are unaccustomed, stuns and confuses him. But eventually he can see, and he returns excitedly to his companions to tell them what he has seen. They find it hard to believe.

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 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 strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This ad- venture rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change. The world is boundless and iridescent; we want to go and see it. We are immersed in its mystery and in its beauty, and over the horizon there is unexplored territory. The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don’t know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.

I have written this book to give an account of what—for me—is the wonder of this adventure. I’ve written with a particular reader in mind: someone who knows little or nothing about today’s physics but is curious to find out what we know, as well as what we don’t yet understand, about the elementary weave of the world— and where we are searching. And I have written it to try to communicate the breathtaking beauty of the panorama of reality that can be seen from this perspective.

I’ve also written it for my colleagues, fellow travelers dispersed throughout the world, as well as for the young women and men with a passion for science, eager to set out on this journey for the first time. I’ve sought to outline the general landscape of the structure of the physical world, as seen by the double lights of relativity and of quantum physics, and to show how they can be combined. This is not only a book of divulgation; it’s also one that articulates a point of view, in a field of research where the abstraction of technical language may sometimes obscure the wide-angle vision. Science is made up of experiments, hypotheses, equations, calculations, and long discussions; but these are only tools, like the instruments of musicians. In the end, what matters in music is the music itself, and what matters in science is the understanding of the world that science provides. To understand the significance of the discovery that Earth turns around the sun, it is not necessary to follow Copernicus’s complicated calculations; to understand the importance of the discovery that all living beings on our planet have the same ancestors, it is not necessary to follow the complex arguments of Dar- win’s books. Science is about reading the world from a gradually widening point of view.

This book gives an account of the current state of the search for our new image of the world, as I understand it today. It is the reply I would give to a colleague and friend asking me, “So, what do you think is the true nature of things?” as we walk along the shore on a long midsummer’s evening.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01FEY5E3O
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books (January 24, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 24, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 14699 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 283 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #67,090 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2 in Waves & Wave Mechanics (Kindle Store)
- #2 in Physics of Gravity (Kindle Store)
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Gary Moreau, Author

An accessible guide to the science of reality and why poetry matters.

Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2020

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Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who is the head of the Quantum Gravity group at Aix-Marseille University in France. He is one of the early proponents of the loop quantum gravity theory and the author of “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.”

As impressive as all of that is, however, don’t let it put you off if you are a lay person like me. While Rovelli admits early on in the book that he wants to make the book satisfying to his colleagues, he wrote it for us.

It is a thoroughly accessible book that is brimming with enthusiasm for the topic, a quality that I have always found pleasing in its own right but essential to giving the reader the strength of curiosity necessary to get through a book about, say, quantum theory.

The story, albeit one of revelation, not fiction, begins in 450BCE, on a boat from Miletus to Abdera. The author introduces us to Anaximander, and takes us all the way up to Stephen Hawking, the current crop of the top theoretical physicists in the world, and beyond, leaving us with a concise but thorough list of that which we still do not know or understand about the reality we live in.

And that, in the end, is one of the defining qualities of this book. The author goes to great lengths to differentiate between established knowledge (i.e. That which has withstood the test of time and observation.), theory, and conjecture.

There are only a handful of equations in the entire book and those can easily be ignored. Rovelli includes them only so that we non-colleagues know they exist and because he, in the most literal sense, finds them to be things of great beauty. (That enthusiasm I talked about.)

He also goes out of his way to avoid the kind of scientific jargon that is hard to digest if you aren’t immersed in it everyday. The language is relatively plain and simple although the concepts may cause you to sit back and think for a minute before you are ready to fully absorb them.

My favorite line in the whole book is, “Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated…” As a writer and armchair philosopher, I have always felt the same way about science and philosophy, which, during the age of Newton, were considered two words to describe the same thing. This is actually a very quantum concept, since the three primary elements of quantum mechanics, or quantum theory, are granularity, indeterminism, and relationality. The world is finite (although very small in many respects), the future can only be defined by probabilities, and everything is definable only in relational context.

I find relationality to be the most critical and relevant in this era of social media and political and cultural division. Individual words, or even sentences, are essentially meaningless without context. We will never understand each other, or agree on anything, if we don’t make the effort to understand the context of who we are and how we got there.

The two pillars of twentieth-century physics are general relativity and quantum mechanics. And while the two “could not be more different from each other”, Rovelli shows that they are complementary, not contradictory, as many of us have been taught. General relativity deals with gravity, space, and time. Quantum theory, on the other hand, deals with some of the challenges to general relativity, such as the concept of infinity, and teaches us to think in terms of processes, not things. (“The theory [quantum theory] does not describe things as they ‘are’; it describes how things ‘occur,’…) In a way, I suppose, it brings general relativity to life.

And what are some of the conclusions? Reality is relational, as noted. The water droplet at the tip of a wave has not been carried from some distant shore. Only the wave has made that journey. “Now doesn’t exist” and nothing is truly infinite. Time, as we have come to think of it, does not exist either. And even the most hardened stone is not motionless. (“The world is not made up of tiny pebbles. It is a world of vibrations, a continuous fluctuation…”) Only heat distinguishes the past from the future, which, of course, we can’t possibly know with certainty. Reality, including us, the homo sapiens, are not atoms. Everything is defined by "the order in which atoms are arranged." (Relationality, in the same way that the alphabet is just symbols until the letters are combined in a certain way to create an epic poem or story.) “Space is no longer different from matter.” And “the gravitational field [which is not fixed, but moves and undulates] is space.”

This is a fascinating book (I read it in one day.) and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand the world around us. It is, in the end, a very optimistic take on the world and its future. And that is certainly something we can all use in the midst of the chaos we currently find ourselves in.

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MAP

Interesting read that will fundamentally alter how you perceive reality

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2019

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Carlo Rovelli's REALITY IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS is a wonderful exploration of the history of the concept of the atom/quanta, the evolution of how humans see the world, and the interesting alternative to string theory for marrying quantum mechanics and general relativity: loop quantum theory.

I think when reviewing/recommending non fiction, there are a few things to take into account:

1. ACCESSIBILITY: This book is not for a physics novice. You will need a basic understanding of physics and some chemistry (mostly pchem) to grasp some concepts. The first half of the book that explores the history is relatively accessible. However, once you get into particle/wave duality, it will help to have at least general chemistry/physics under you belt. Although I was completely lost when we got to "information theory."

2. BIAS/REPRESENTATION: This is where I think this book falls short. I would have loved a direct comparison of loop quantum theory with string theory. What are advantages/disadvantages to both? Where does on shine more? How can both be improved?

3. CLARITY: Concepts were brilliantly explained. I often have trouble with visualization, but the alien concepts of loops, spin foam, and time as a construct of thermodynamics wee effectively portrayed.

I loved this book. From the history to the new concepts, I could feel it pushing and pulling my brain like putty in different directions. Although the last chapter became a little preachy, this is a wonderfully written exploration of the big and small and how to meld the two. If you are in the mood for a mind-bending experience that will fundamentally alter how you perceive the world, pick this one up!

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Raisuli the Magnificent

An excellent layman's look at the core of modern physics.

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2021

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I used to waste a lot of time thinking and theorizing about Einstein's theory relativity. how it was a more accurate descriptor than conventional Newtonian mechanics, and why Einstein's core theory seemed incomplete. No matter how much math I took I just could not get any headway. And, apparently, no matter how much advanced math anyone took, no one could get anywhere.

Well, a group of physicists have finally broken through, and Carlo Rovelli is one such man who has written a really magnificent book explaining the current thinking of quantum gravity, the graviton, and how at a very basic and fundamental level the universe actually works. Thank goodness.

If you're looking for "why" or other philosophical "wherefores", this is not the book for you. This is essentially a lay person's book to understanding the history and conclusion of how and why current physicists think that quantum gravity is the ultimate culmination in physics.

I've bought and purchased various books on the topic over the years, seen all of the PBS and World Science programs and videos on the matter and matters related, and I think I can safely say that Carlo Rovelli has provded me and others the answers us scientifically curious individuals who are not professional scientists, with a really cool, easy to read, fun to read, summation of quantum gravity.

Honestly I feel relieved. Not only have my nagging questions about space, time and gravity been answered, I now understand why the physical world is the way it is, and how future engineering projects may or may not be possible, or possible in principle but limited by other factors relating to quantum gravity. Honestly, I was one of those young science fans who had stars in their eyes when it came to all kinds of cool and futuristic concepts, and this books explains why some of those are doable, why others are not, what reality is, and what time is and is not, and again pretty much what you and I experience on a day to day basis.

In a kind of odd sense it's almost a heartwarming book by presenting science as a work based effort that required some imagination to accept where observation and data were leading scientists. That is it reaffirms the scientific method, doesn't delve too much into political history of science, cuts right to the matter, and explains the system of nodes and links as constituting quantum gravity.

Thank you Mister Carlo Rovelli. Your book is much appreciated. I'm just sorry your book didn't come out thirty years before because you would have saved me a lot of intellectual headaches, but I'm glad to have read your really magnificent book all the same.

If you have a craving for theoretical physics, are tired of a lot of fluff about string theory, parallel universes, derivatives from quantum field theory and the like, then read this book. Carlo Rovelli explains quantum field theory, gives you some physic's history from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians up through the middle ages and renaissance to the present day, to conclude with how current thinking of quantum gravity got to where it is today.

Really a great and easy to read book. Check it out and enjoy.

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Rainbow

Exciting, deep, informative and a pleasure to read!

Reviewed in Canada on July 9, 2021

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This is such a great book! A great read for anyone interested in Quantum Physics who is not a scientist. Rovelli does a great job explaining all concepts in a fascinating yet easy to understand way. It is very exciting to see how our understanding of the mysteries of the Universe develops over time. The journey begins in 450 BCE and continues till present time... Highly recommend this book to anyone who is fascinated to see the big picture of the tiniest elements of the Universe!

One person found this helpful

Binu v.

Quantum gravity.... A subject yet to be evolved to it's fullest

Reviewed in India on April 11, 2024

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I am an ardent reader of physics subjects, I have read many books on physics ,but only a few of them imparted a satisfactory outlook so that a person with basic awareness of physics can understand it's content, but this one is a amazingly special for the simple reason that a person with general awareness about physics can understand. It covered almost every topics of main theories of classical, relativistic and quantum mechanics with such brevity and simplicity... Thanks to the author who tried his level best to come to the strata of an average physics enthusiast. After reading this book I got immense satisfaction which no other books of the same sort could provide... This is a must read book and I assure that you will get something very special which you will experience later...

Mike Walters

The new Einstein of the 21st century.

Reviewed in Brazil on February 1, 2021

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There is a solution. And Carlo Rovelli brings this solution by showing in a simple and impressive way that quantum mechanics and general relativity can ultimately be unified by a loop theory of a granular quantum structure of space. A new Einstein of the 21st century is born!

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Luca

imparare a convivere con l’ignoto

Reviewed in Italy on December 10, 2022

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Carlo Rovelli presenta come si è evoluta la visione del mondo per arrivare attraverso la quantum gravity ad un tentativo di coniugare l’indeterminazione della teoria quantistica con la granularità delle cose della relatività generale. Ci si è riusciti? Le due teorie oggi sopravvissute string e loop sono ancora divise pure se quest’ultima sta raccogliendo indizi a suo favore. A fronte della mancanza di certezza rimane lo spirito della scienza che dubita di ogni certezza e che trova il suo valore nel dare le risposte che servono consapevole che domani queste cambieranno. Un libro molto bello da leggere.

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Olaf van Kooten

It is really not what it seems

Reviewed in the Netherlands on September 29, 2022

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Mind bogelling, not easy but gratifying to read. The way reality is experienced through the lens of quantum gravity comes very close to what Buddhist philosophy claims as seeing nirvana in samsara.

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