Top 160 Carlo Rovelli Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It is with sadness that every so often I spend a few hours on the internet, reading or listening to the mountain of stupidity dressed up with the word “quantum.”

— Carlo Rovelli

52. “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.”

— Carlo Rovelli

53. “Wonder is the source of our desire for knowledge,1 and the discovery that time is not what we thought it was opens up a thousand questions.”

— Carlo Rovelli

54. “The world is strange, but simple.”

— Carlo Rovelli

55. “Color is the speed at which Faraday’s lines vibrate, and this is determined by the vibrations of the electric charges that emit light. These charges are the electrons that move inside the atoms.”

— Carlo Rovelli

56. “And there is the fact that what matters is not how things are, but rather how they interact. Spin networks are not entities; they describe the effect of space upon things. Just as an electron is in no place-is diffused in a cloud of probability in all places-space is not actually forned by a single specific spin network, but rather by a cloud of probabilities over the whole range of all possible spin networks.”

— Carlo Rovelli

57. “The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty.”

— Carlo Rovelli

58. “Quanta of space mingle with the foam of spacetime, and the structure of things is born from reciprocal information that weaves the correlations among the regions of the world.”

— Carlo Rovelli

59. “Color as we perceive it is our psychophysical reaction of the nerve signal generated by the receptors of our eyes, which distinguish electromagnetic waves of different frequencies.”

— Carlo Rovelli

60. “There is no preferred direction of time without heat.”

— Carlo Rovelli

61. “In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don’t get anywhere by not ‘wasting’ time- something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.”

— Carlo Rovelli

62. “Science is about reading the world from a gradually widening point of view.”

— Carlo Rovelli

63. “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.”

— Carlo Rovelli

64. “I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less so now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me. It did not scare me when I was young, and I thought at the time that this was because it was such a remote prospect. But now, at sixty, the fear has yet to arrive. I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to a well-earned rest.”

— Carlo Rovelli

65. “I believe that this example demonstrates how great science and great poetry are both visionary, and may even arrive at the same intuitions. Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.”

— Carlo Rovelli

66. “We are made up of the same atoms and the same light signals as are exchanged between pine trees in the mountains and stars in the galaxies.”

— Carlo Rovelli

67. “The entropy of the world in the far past appears very low to us. But this might not reflect the exact state of the world: it might regard the subset of the world’ s variables with which we, as physical systems, have interacted. It is with respect to the dramatic blurring produced by our interactions with the world, caused by the small set of macroscopic variables in terms of which we describe the world, that the entropy of the universe was low.”

— Carlo Rovelli

68. “But it isn’t absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is, in the end, something good and even beautiful, because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life.”

— Carlo Rovelli

69. “The ability to understand something before it’s observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.”

— Carlo Rovelli

70. “The border is porous. Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth. But the value of knowledge remains. If we find the antelope, we can eat.”

— Carlo Rovelli

71. “It is like the point where the rainbow touches the forest. We think that we can see it – but if we go to look for it, it isn’t there.”

— Carlo Rovelli

72. “Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home. This strange, multicoloured and astonishing world which we explore – where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere – is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling. About the stuff of which we ourselves are made.”

— Carlo Rovelli

73. “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.” Illusion.”

— Carlo Rovelli

74. “If I ask whether two events – one on Earth and the other on Proxima b – are happening “at the same moment,” the correct answer would be: “It’s a question that doesn’t make sense, because there is no such thing as ‘the same moment’ definable in the universe.” The “present of the universe” is meaningless.”

— Carlo Rovelli

75. “Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.”

— Carlo Rovelli

76. “Quantum mechanics extends this relativity in a radical way: all variable aspects of an object exist only in relation to other objects. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.”

— Carlo Rovelli

77. “Nature is behaving with us like that elderly rabbi to whom two men went in order to settle a dispute. Having listened to the first, the rabbi says: “You are in the right.” The second insists on being heard. The rabbi listens to him and says: “You’re also right.” Having overheard from the next room, the rabbi’s wife then calls out, “But they can’t both be in the right!” The rabbi reflects and nods before concluding: “And you’re right too.” A.”

— Carlo Rovelli

78. “Every day countless people die, and yet those who remain live as if they were immortals.”

— Carlo Rovelli

79. “In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else.”

— Carlo Rovelli

80. “The heat of black holes is like the Rosetta stone of physics, written in a combination of three languages- quantum, gravitational, and thermodynamic- still awaiting decipherment in order to reveal the true nature of time.”

— Carlo Rovelli

81. “We have a hundred billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in a galaxy, with an even more astronomical number of links and potential combinations through which they can interact. We are not conscious of all of this. “We” are the process formed by this entire intricacy, not just by the little of it of which we are conscious.”

— Carlo Rovelli

82. “Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change.”

— Carlo Rovelli

83. “When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration. When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of the blackboard in his study. There’s a drawing on it. A drawing of the ‘light-filled box’ in Einstein’s thought experiment. To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.”

— Carlo Rovelli

84. “Temporality is profoundly linked to blurring. The blurring is due to the fact that we are ignorant of the microscopic details of the world. The time of physics is, ultimately, the expression of our ignorance of the world. Time is ignorance.”

— Carlo Rovelli

85. “A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.”

— Carlo Rovelli

86. “Genius hesitates.”

— Carlo Rovelli

87. “An elementary structure of the world is emerging, generated by a swarm of quantum events, where time and space do not exist. Quantum fields draw together space, time, matter, and light, exchanging information between one event and another. Reality is a network of granular events; the dynamic that connects them is probabilistic; between one event and another, space, time, matter, and energy melt into a cloud of probability.”

— Carlo Rovelli

88. “Those who defend this way of thinking about reality – eternalism – frequently cite Einstein, who in a famous letter writes: For people like us who believe in physics the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

— Carlo Rovelli

89. “Poetry and science are both manifestations of the spirit that creates new ways of thinking the world, in order to understand it better. Great science and great poetry are both visionary, and sometimes may arrive at the same insights. The culture of today that keeps science and poetry so far apart is essentially foolish, to my way of thinking, because it makes us less able to see the complexity and the beauty of the world as revealed by both.”

— Carlo Rovelli

90. “Those who criticize the usefulness of philosophy for science, Aristotle has noticed, are not doing science: they are doing philosophy.”

— Carlo Rovelli

91. “Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippie world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things. The.”

— Carlo Rovelli

92. “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.”

— Carlo Rovelli

93. “If things fall, it is due to this slowing down of time. Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. They float, without falling. Here on the surface of our planet, on the other hand, the movement of things inclines naturally toward where time passes more slowly, as when we run down the beach into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst into the waves. Things fall downward because, down there, time is slowed by the Earth.”

— Carlo Rovelli

94. “Clues put us on the right path toward a correct theory. Strong evidence is that which subsequently allows us to trust whether the theory we have built is a good one or not. Without.”

— Carlo Rovelli

95. “What opens our minds and shows the limits of our ideas is an encounter with other people, other cultures, other ideas.”

— Carlo Rovelli

96. “The world is complex, and we capture it with different languages, each appropriate to the process that we are describing.”

— Carlo Rovelli

97. “I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have even been in existence. We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes that we have triggered are unlikely to spare us.”

— Carlo Rovelli

98. “Things” in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous.”

— Carlo Rovelli

99. “To ask oneself in general what exists or what is real means only to ask how would you like to use a verb and an adjective; it’s a grammatical question, not a question about nature. Nature, for its part, is what it is, and we discover it very gradually. If our grammar and our intuition do not readily adapt to what we discover, well, too bad. We must seek to adapt them.”

— Carlo Rovelli

100. “A moving object therefore experiences a shorter duration than a stationary one: a watch marks fewer seconds, a plant grows more slowly, a young man dreams less. For a moving object, time contracts.”

— Carlo Rovelli