Yes, “brief” is right: 10 pages per lesson, and the typeface is large. There are also some space-filling illustrations. Yet the subject matter of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is immense: the very nature of the universe, from the sub-atomic scale to space and time.
The brevity has been key to its success. People who want to know about science can be daunted by detail: here, it has all been stripped away, with the exception of one equation – Riemann’s, describing the equivalence of space and gravitational fields. “It takes a little commitment and effort”, says Rovelli, “to study and digest Riemann’s mathematics”, which is an understatement.
But otherwise, this is the book to read if you know very little about modern physics but want to begin to grasp its wonder, and the potential it has to enrich our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Not that we have quite got there yet. In prose that is both suggestive and comprehensible (I salute the translators, Simon Carnell and Erica Segre), Rovelli explains that there are fundamental inconsistencies between Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum theory; both can’t be right unless a sort of jerry-rigged science is bolted on to make up what is known as the Standard Model. This, we are told, lacks the elegance of other theories and explanations; and physicists distrust a lack of elegance.
For the moment, we have to stay with the Standard Model. It may not be very elegant, but it works remarkably well at describing the world around us. And who knows? Perhaps on closer inspection it is not the model that lacks elegance. Perhaps it is we who have not yet learnt to look at it from the right point of view.
And that, really, is the heart of the book: it is an attempt to show how science can give us the right point of view, or works only when we have it. From the human point of view, the world is not a sphere and the sun travels around it. Luckily, disproving the former notion was relatively easy; disproving the latter took rather longer. But the shift to a heliocentric model made everything simpler; a similar, or analogous shift in perspective may in the future help us come to a better understanding of, say, time.
That’s quite a big problem. Rovelli is the proposer of the thermal time hypothesis, which states (so far as I understand it) that time is an illusion given substance by the statistical nature of thermodynamics (that is, the reason a cold spoon gets warmer and not colder in a cup of tea is only because it is much more likely to get warmer; for it to get colder is not actually impossible). He is also the co-author of the theory of loop quantum gravity, and so has the scientific chops for the book. You can read about it in his fifth lesson.
This is not, though, an ultimately cheering read. Such wonder as Rovelli encourages us to feel is tempered with a sobering sense of perspective, as you might expect from someone who has been trying all his professional life to unify the large and the small. There is some headily poetic stuff about how “the letters of the cosmic alphabet ... tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties, and of the night sky studded with stars,” while omitting to mention that this same alphabet also spells out Nigel Farage and the slime mould, which are not quite as evocative. But he warns us at the end that “I believe our species will not last for long ... We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. Also, we do damage.” But we also discover, as this book tells us so very elegantly.
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