
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

he soon came to understand that gravity, like electricity, must be conveyed by a field as well: a ‘gravitational field’ analogous to the ‘electrical field’ must exist.
Carlo Rovelli • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
The confusion between these two diverse human activities – inventing stories and following traces in order to find something – is the origin of the incomprehension and distrust of science shown by a significant part of our contemporary culture. The separation is a subtle one: the antelope hunted at dawn is not far removed from the antelope deity in
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Albert was reading Kant and attending occasional lectures at the University of Pavia: for pleasure, without being registered there or having to think about exams. It is thus that serious scientists are made.
Carlo Rovelli • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Heisenberg imagined that electrons do not always exist. They only exist when someone or something watches them, or better, when they are interacting with something else. They materialize in a place, with a calculable probability, when colliding with something else. The ‘quantum leaps’ from one orbit to another are the only means they have of being
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Heat, as we know, always moves from hot things to cold.
Carlo Rovelli • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
itself and the Earth does not turn around it because of a mysterious force but because it is racing directly in a space which inclines, like a marble that rolls in a funnel. There are no mysterious forces generated at the centre of the funnel; it is the curved nature of the walls which causes the marble to roll. Planets circle around the sun, and t
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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 hippy world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things.
Carlo Rovelli • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
the electromagnetic field. This field is a real entity which, diffused everywhere, carries radio waves, fills space, can vibrate and oscillate like the surface of a lake, and ‘transports’ the electrical force.
Carlo Rovelli • Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Friction produces heat.