On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy <\/p>\n
Author: Carlo Rovelli trans. Simon Carnell <\/p>\n
ISBN-13: 978-0241733707<\/p>\n
Publisher: Allen Lane <\/p>\n
Guideline Price: \u00a320; 192pp<\/p>\n
It is a misconception widely entertained, even by some of its cleverest practitioners, that science is engaged in the pursuit of ultimate, foundational truths about the nature of reality. Science, unlike art, has rigour, and makes rigorous pronouncements on the nature of things. An equation cannot be gainsaid. So it is believed. <\/p>\n
This delusion is a relatively modern phenomenon. Even at the height of what we call the Renaissance, scientists \u2013 or natural philosophers, as they were called then \u2013 did not imagine that they were figuring the world and the heavens as they actually are. Rather, they were content to \u201csave the phenomena\u201d, as they put it, that is, to devise systems that would agree with the evidence presented to them by the physical world. To know how things really are was God\u2019s business, certainly not ours.<\/p>\n
With the Renaissance, with the Enlightenment, with the industrial revolution, human arrogance, not to say hubris, inexorably set in. Isaac Newton (d.1747), one of the greatest minds our species has produced, and one of the most unappetising personalities, discovered, or better say invented, a set of laws governing the mechanics of the quotidian world, laws that are still valid, in the quotidian world, at our scale, despite Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity, despite quantum theory, and despite whatever mind-boggling theory is to come next. <\/p>\n
We live in a Newtonian world. The table we eat at is made up of a countless number of unimaginably tiny particles, yet it stoutly sustains our plates, our knives and forks, and our elbows. As Carlo Rovelli writes: \u201cWe are in the world. We are here. And we are home.\u201d<\/p>\n
But are we content, here at home? Do we not, in what the poet Wallace Stevens called our \u201crage for order\u201d, still hanker after simple, stable, incontrovertible proofs of the world\u2019s workings? Indeed we do. But Rovelli is here, gently, to dash our hopes: \u201cRespectful of all philosophies, but a humble devotee of the so-called exact sciences, I find it wiser to abandon the goal of certainty altogether, in all aspects of knowledge.\u201d Read that sentence again, and feel the foundations of our most cherished and most aspirational beliefs crumble to dust.<\/p>\n
And do not imagine that Rovelli is some new age guru urging us to chill out and stop worrying about ultimate truths. Born in Verona 70 years ago, he has had a brilliant career as a theoretical physicist, doing his main work in the field of loop quantum gravity, as well as being one of the most stimulating popularisers of science and the philosophy of science. His books include Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time and Reality Is not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity. He is emeritus professor at the Centre of Physics Theory in Marseilles, and works at the Western University in Canada and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.<\/p>\n
On the Equality of All Things is his most ambitious work so far. It is written in clear, crisp prose studded with gems of poetic insight, and ventures deeply into the realms of western and eastern philosophy, quoting as freely from the great second-century Buddhist teacher N\u0101g\u0101rjuna and the 19th-century American pragmatist Charles Saunders Peirce, as from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger.<\/p>\n
Significantly, the book was written in response to an invitation to deliver a series of lectures, or \u201clessons\u201d, as Rovelli calls them, to the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University late in 2024. One might imagine it would have been discomforting for a physicist to be thrown into such an arena, but if Rovelli was daunted he certainly hides it well. His tone is sure, his assertions are bold, and he has not the slightest hesitation in taking an occasional swipe at what he sees as the complacency, and in some cases the plain stupidity, of professional philosophers. They must have been lively, those couple of months in Princeton, when this obstreperous savant \u2013 Rovelli was a student activist in the 1970s \u2013 was rattling the branches in that venerable grove of academe. <\/p>\n
It would be a disservice to the reader to pretend that this is an easy book, but the labour we are required to give to it is amply rewarded by the excitement of the venture, by the richness of the lessons we are offered, and by moments of pure aesthetic bliss, when this or that knotty concept is suddenly, silkily unravelled for us by the ever-accommodating Prof Rovelli. For the nervous ones among us, such as this reviewer, it might easiest to read the very short preface and jump straight to the afterword, take a breather, and then tackle the main text, which begins with the cheering observation that \u201cWe are united by our curiosity.\u201d<\/p>\n