143 Quotes by Carlo Rovelli

Bertrand Russell describes the same idea thus: “the raw material out of which the world is built up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind; it is simply arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations: some arrangements may be called mental, while others may be called physical.

I think that the resistance against Darwin is not just the difficulty of seeing the power of a spectacularly beautiful explanation: it is the fear of realizing the extraordinary power that such an explanation has in shattering rests of old world views.

Time opens up our limited access to the world. Time, then, is the form in which we beings, whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight, interact with the world: it is the source of identity.

We are the products of a long selection process of chemical, biological, and cultural structures that at different levels have interacted for a long time in order to shape the funny process that we are.

We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider.

The entropy of a system depends explicitly on blurring. It depends on what I do not register, because it depends on the number of indistinguishable configurations. The same microscopic configuration may be of high entropy with regard to one blurring and of low in relation to another.

How long is forever?” asks Alice. “Sometimes, just one second,” replies the White Rabbit. There are dreams lasting an instant in which everything seems frozen for an eternity.

Einstein’s 1905 paper came out and suddenly changed people’s thinking about space-time. We’re again in the middle of something like that. When the dust settles, time – whatever it may be – could turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein could imagine.