“Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” is most definitely a vast journey in the deepest science you could imagine. Rovelli acts as a sort of guide that leads the reader through the complexity of Nature.
We live in a very strange world, governed by very strange rules. The writer explains that, on one hand, the universe seems to obey our elegant equations and, on the other, there doesn’t seem to be a way to simplify the disorder in the Standard Model. The latter is a theory that makes predictions about the world in an absurd and convoluted manner; it is made up of various pieces assembled without any clear order, “it’s as if God had not designed reality with a line that was heavily scored, but just dotted it with a faint outline”, unbelievable!
“There is no longer space which ‘contains’ the world, and there is no longer time ‘in which’ events occur. There are only elementary processes wherein quanta of space and matter continually interact with each other”.
However, this small book does not pretend to be able to explain everything. I think the purpose of the book is to picture physics as a work of art, as an infinite and sublime painting.
Rovelli teaches the reader why there are no things in the world apart from temporary events, how heat and time are related, what an atom of space is and why it might be the missing piece of the puzzle in the desperate attempt of connecting the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics with the beautiful loop quantum gravity theory; what the Big Bang is and why it could have been a Big Bounce and, most importantly, how we could live in this world entirely based on interactions, on happenings.
If you are a science enthusiast, or just a curious person, this little big book is an opportunity that you shouldn’t miss out on.