Book Review — Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
This afternoon, I finished Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli. Carlo, who published his book in 2014, is an Italian theoretical physicist.
In this short 56-page book, which took me this long to read because of the drama of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Carlo provides an overview of what he considers the most fascinating aspects of the great revolution that has occurred in post-Newtonian physics in the twentieth and twenty-first century. He intends to make these concepts easy for those who know little or nothing about modern science because the study of physics helps us understand the world.
The book is a short guide of the following seven concepts — the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the architecture of the cosmos, elementary particles, quantum gravity, probability and the heat of black holes, and, finally, how humans fit into this picture.
As we are led to how Albert Einstein gifted us the theory of relativity, the reader would not fail to realize how much some of the things Albie had done prior to this time had nothing to do with physics. He had left high school unable to endure the rigors of his education, started reading Kant, and was attending occasional lectures in a nearby university for pleasure. The author, an accomplished scientist himself, remarked that serious scientists are made by having them do the things they find immense pleasure in without the need to feel guilty about ‘wasting time’ or ‘loafing around.’ That may be instructive to parents of teenagers today.
As I read, something else that struck me is how much the ‘Eureka’ moment takes. To generate the papers that made him instantly famous, Einstein worked for over 10 years, getting himself engaged in frenzied study, attempts, errors, confusion, mistaken articles, and misconceived ideas. In a world of quick fixes, how do we continue to incentivize people to work for decades, if possible, undisturbed?
Even better, more than anything, a concept that reverberates through this book’s pages is that science constantly builds on knowledge. Even the great Einstein built on the works of many other people, including the most outstanding Carl Friedrich Gauss, who is known as the prince of mathematicians. Progress stagnates when each generation is required to start all over again. Indeed, Niels Bohr and his young disciples would not have been able to capture the strange quantum nature of matter if he had no idea about Ernest Rutherford’s nuclear structure and Max Planck’s quantum theory. You can now understand how this preservation of knowledge led to the first industrial revolution in that part of the world.
Do you know that time passes more quickly high up than below, nearer to the Earth? So if a man who has lived at sea level meets up with his twin who has lived in the mountains, he will find that his sibling is slightly older than him. Einstein, through formulas, predicted this, and many years after his death, this was measured and turned out to be the case.
Physics is very much about intuition. A scientist starts with a premise and works to prove that it is true. However, very many times, when put into the furnace of rigorous examination, these hunch feelings turn out false. These failures to not place our entire trust on guesses are responsible for scientists’ hesitation in declaring their theories complete. For example, when introducing the world to the brilliant quantum theory, Einstein used lines like ‘It seems to me …’, ‘I think …’. Michael Faraday also displayed hesitation when introducing the revolutionary idea of magnetic fields. Genius hesitates, the author declared.
Some of the theories, even when accepted, made little sense. For example, when Werner Heisenberg came up with the correct imagination that electrons do not always exist but that the only time they come into existence is when they are interacting with something else and that we do not even know how they will interact with each other, Einstein said it was such a brilliant concept deserving of a Nobel Prize, yet it did not make much sense. We have used this theory to develop GPS, mobile phones, and Fluorescent light, yet some of our best physicists continue to ask the question, ‘what really is quantum theory?’
This discomfiture is why a unique feature of science is its quickness to say, ‘we do not know.’ Ask scientists how the world came by, and Carlo echoes what the individual scientists in the scientific community will answer you; we do not know. In fact, as two of the most famous gems in physics — general relativity and quantum mechanics — contradict each other, physicists are puzzled that they work remarkably well. However, it is said that they cannot both be right. So the search for the pieces of the puzzle continues.
It is in this book that, for the first time, I developed a fundamental knowledge of black holes to the extent that I can comfortably explain it to a 5-year-old. Moreover, in this book, some questions I had hitherto not asked were answered. For example, a question such as ‘Why does heat go from hot things to cold things, and not vice versa?’
Are you aware that the idea of a present that is common to the whole universe is an illusion? When his great Italian friend Michele Besso died, Einstein wrote a moving letter to Michele’s sister: ‘Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present, and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.’ How could this be? Many philosophers were irked by this submission to the extent that the followers of one of them, Martin Heidegger, dismissed physics as a misleading form of knowledge. Carlo attempts to answer this question by letting us in on the intimate connection between time and heat. His explanation is fascinating.
As he explains the vastness of the universe, he surmises that humans think too highly of themselves. We are stardust, the author reminds us, impossibly minor players in the pageant of the galaxies, and well on our way to becoming the agents of our own demise through our blatant disregard of the environment.
While the book promised to engage those without a knowledge of physics, I perceive through my experience in writing that those without a background would struggle on some pages. Nevertheless, my position does not mean much when you have a product that outsold “Fifty Shades of Grey” in the country where it was first published. This book grew out of columns written by Carlo in an Italian newspaper. The large readership of the column was not accidental because since the book was published, it has been translated into 52 languages selling over a million copies already.
I dream of that love for science in my dear country, Nigeria.
