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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.
“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.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
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...
Reviews-
November 14, 2016 In his latest explanatory work, Rovelli (Seven Brief Lessons on Physics), a theoretical physicist and proponent of loop quantum gravity, sets himself the difficult task of attempting to clarify for laypeople the most recent scientific theories about the nature of the universe. He begins with historical lessons, going back to philosophical questions posed in Western antiquity. Rovelli races forward through the work of Newton, Faraday, and Maxwell to get to how Einstein refined and added to the field theories of electromagnetism. One of the book’s strengths is the picture Rovelli develops of how scientists build on the work of others. But the bulk of the book focuses on evaluating the perplexing nature of space and time, which, as they are commonly understood, appear to be little more than convenient constructs. “Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity,” Rovelli writes, while “the world is made entirely made from quantum fields.” The difficulty of understanding this aside, Rovelli smoothly conveys the differences between belief and proof, and concludes with a lovely chapter on being ignorant and eager for the next discovery. Rovelli’s work is challenging, but his excitement is contagious and he delights in the possibilities of human understanding.
November 1, 2016 When theoretical physicist Rovelli's Seven Lessons in Physics became an international bestseller in 2015, his Italian publisher proceeded to translate this, his previous book, which turns out to be an admirable addition to a popular genre: explaining what scientists know about the universe and their struggles to learn more.Most authors in this subject begin with the Greeks and make their ways through Newton, Galileo, and Maxwell to the glories of Einstein's relativity and the founders of quantum mechanics. In good hands, this is a smooth ride, and Rovelli--the head of the Quantum Gravity group at Aix-Marseille University and one of the founders of the loop quantum gravity theory--is good. Then the story gets tougher. Relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible, and physicists today are trying to combine them to produce a single, satisfying theory of everything. This requires complex ideas that dissect everything, space-time included, to a very, very tiny state where their quintessence emerges. Rovelli delivers a respectful nod to string theory, but he belongs to the rival school of quantum loop gravity, the central feature of which is that space itself is quantized. "The central prediction of loop theory is...that space is not a continuum," writes the author, "it is not divisible ad infinitum, it is formed of 'atoms of space, ' a billion billion times smaller than the smallest of atomic nuclei." Got it? For some readers, the narrative will be a slog. Science buffs will admire Rovelli's lucid writing, but at some point, many will realize that they no longer understand. 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.
COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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