The big ideas
Let us apply principle the first: There are not many books that can make you feel small — infinitesimal, even — and not trouble your internal emotional architecture in the slightest. Principle the second: Fewer books still, fitting the above bill, fail to provide the perspective they seek to provide. This book is one of them. A priori. See what we’re doing there? Physics talk, kids, so eyes front and center.
The premise of this exceedingly short volume is admirable: Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli will, in a brace of mini-lessons, walk us through the basic principles of a brand of science whose mere mention tends to terrify. Physics and math are terms many of us balk at, but worry not, you will never feel lost in these pages, even as you ponder such delights as how one thing and its opposite can both be true at the same time. Or the particular doozy that the world perhaps sprang into being from an interregnum chapter in the cosmos when there was no universe, no space, no time, no nothing. The blank blink between changing one channel to the next, at the level of ultimate Creation.
Even writing this now, I’m sensitive to the connotations, physics-wise, of verbs as seemingly elemental as “is,” because “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” is a book that calls much into question. “The world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships,” Rovelli writes, meaning everything exists only insofar as its relationship to something else.
Kant, as Rovelli points out, would be horrified. Even notions of “here” — as in, I am sitting here writing this review, you are sitting where you are, reading it — go, as Doctor Who might say, “all timey-wimey.” “Consequently, ‘here’ is a word the meaning of which depends on where it is spoken. The technical term for this is ‘indexical.’ ”
Indeed. Just as it’s indexical to say that this book can be both a neat little jogstep of a primer, and a completely wasted opportunity.
There is nothing you won’t understand in Rovelli’s prose until we come to the final chapter, which looks at one’s place in this world of physics, and in parts reads like some shamanistic Jim Morrison desert trip. Some philosophical riffing after the arguments of science have had their glossing. Rovelli’s language has, at its best, the simple elegance of E.B. White’s, and he’s wise to help you settle by saying, in one instance, that Einstein’s theory of relativity isn’t all that scary; just think of it like a work of art, like “King Lear.”
Other times, there are pictures sufficiently reductive that no matter how you are, you will be well at your ease and quickly informed. And when Rovelli points out something about, say, protons, that we don’t know yet, and maybe never will, there’s a certain sense and ease there, too. For just as much as physics is about knowing, it’s even more about wondering, juxtaposing why against why not, and trying the various dimly lit paths that suggest themselves out the miasma, and then finding one’s way back to report what holds true and what does not.
We are in a “world of happenings and not things,” where the passage of time is most closely linked to things becoming less warm. Time itself vibrates, but it also doesn’t exist in the way we tend to think of time, as the chronological line of our experiences, memories, blow-byblow ledgering of the mistakes we made last weekend. Discoveries are toasted, scientists celebrated, setbacks applauded much like breakthroughs, given that the latter fuel the former, each existing, in a way, because the other does.
There is the nagging sense, though, that a book like this is meant to hook people normally terrified by “weighty” scientific thought — a kind of “Physics for Dummies,” which you can read in 45 minutes — and to get parents to plunk down the cash so that precocious Susie, as she heads into next year’s AP classes, can be one further up still.
Feels like a quick-draw marketing move to me, and reads like one as well, in that you can read this book once, and there’s not much more to get from it. No one is saying it need be like a star that gets pulled inside out by its own weight and becomes a black hole beckoning ever inward, but you are getting played a touch here.
The very idea of massive ideas made simple is an appealing one, but this is more about a point of pride — if you are a person who goes in for this kind of thing — in being able to name-drop a theory or two, venture into some quark-speak, or get “deep” with your buddies over some beers, telling yourself that “Seven Brief Lessons” was an invaluable read. It’s anything but, but we all sit where we sit.