#2554 - Carlo Rovelli
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Who is Carlo Rovelli and what is his new book about?
The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Very nice to meet you.
Shaw Rogan, I'm very happy. Thank you very much for inviting this invitation.
I'm happy to talk to you. I've uh enjoyed your work. So this is very exciting for me. Oh fantastic. I've heard many conversations with you. I uh how do first of all, please tell everybody what you do. What do I do? Yes. I should probably start more podcasts out this
way. Uh I do science, I do philosophy, I do some politics, I enjoy life, I fall in love, I do all the things people do in life. Uh kind of things, yes. Offi officially my job description is a physicist. I do quantum gravity, theoretical physics.
And um w w the pitch that they sent me, uh I guess Who is A? The I don't know who the publicists are. Okay. Uh on the equality of all things. Oh the book. It's the
last book I I published. Yes. I w I'm going to publish. It's coming out in a few days.
Yeah, it comes out September fifteenth and what a what are we at today? Today is the eighth. Yeah.
How does Rovelli explain the quantum view of reality and the role of perspective?
Um this is a a very fascinating subject. You w you're you're talking about That things don't exist in isolation. That everything is somehow connected. Yeah. What I've always sort of intu intuitively s suspected that that was the case. There's probably something to that. But to hear a person like you say it, it makes me much happier. Like, okay, maybe I'm on the right track. Like what what gives you this inclination and why did you want to write about this?
Yeah, um I'm not surprised you say so because that you sort of feel that that makes sense. Because uh in a sense is what we're used to, right, in our everyday life. We uh we interact with persons and persons are the way they interact with us and them, their relations, their stuff. We always see things from our own perspective. Then somehow science, physics in particular, seemed to be telling us, oh okay, no, no, yes, okay there is all this perspective, but there is an objective fixed reality down there. We can look at it from the outside, is made by little things, each one with its own properties. Except that uh in the evolution of physics itself, in r relative recent time, the last century with quantum mechanics, this idea of an objective reality doesn't work much.
And so in a sense we're going back to a more intuitive picture of the world. The very idea of an objective reality down there might be wrong. In fact I think it's wrong. I think that's what quantum mechanics is telling us.
So when you say objective reality, meaning the reality that we're seeing and experiencing, that this is just a tiny fraction of what's real, or that we're getting a distorted perception of what's real?
Um, we are getting a perception, a perspective on what is real. I mean, I see you, you're real, of course. I see this pen. This pen is real, of course. I'm not denying that there is some reality. But the way you see the pen is different from mine, of course, just because you see it from the other side. So you have a perspective, I have a perspective. And uh the question is: do all do all this perspective match perfectly into a unique objective reality of the pen? And I think quantum mechanics. Telling us no. Reality is this ensemble of perspectives. So the properties of the pen, where it is, its color, how long it is, all all all the properties of the pen are not really properties of the pen, it's how the pen looks to you, how the pen looks to me.
Not just you and me as human beings. How the pen clashes another pen, how it affects another pen. Mm. Um so we we should understand, I think. uh reality as this network of interaction, how things look to everything else. which is a more beautiful picture of reality than just, you know, we being outside and looking from the outside. We are inside reality. We are part of reality. So what we see is just a part of how things interact with one another. It's how they interact with us.
So when when you you're talking about objective reality, so w one of the problems that human beings have is our senses and we assume that our senses see everything that's there to be seen.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Who is Carlo Rovelli and what is his new book about?
0:04–1:09
2
How does Rovelli explain the quantum view of reality and the role of perspective?
1:09–6:38
3
What is the double‑slit experiment and why does it challenge classical intuition?
6:38–1:17:53
4
How can we build a better world without relying on nuclear power?
1:17:53–1:23:13
5
What does the discussion reveal about consciousness, AI, and certainty?
1:23:13–1:36:56
6
Why do the hosts argue that curiosity is the key to generating new ideas?
1:36:56–2:04:02
7
How does Carlo Rovelli explain his work on loop quantum gravity and the early universe?
2:04:02–2:32:00