Carlo Rovelli on Modern Physics
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Pat Kenny Show on News Talk. We think of the world as being made up of objects, things that exist in themselves in a fixed space, moving through a universal time. But modern physics paints a very different picture. There's no absolute reference point, there's no universal now. The properties of things may only exist in relation to other things. And according to the eminent physicist Carlo Rovelli, even our ideas of the
What does “the equality of all things” mean in Carlo Rovelli’s new book?
things about knowledge, consciousness, cause and effect, and ultimate truth need to be reconsidered. His new book is called On the Equality of All Things, and it explores what happens when we take the lessons of quantum mechanics and relativity seriously and apply them not just to physics, but to our understanding of what it actually means to exist. Carlo Rovelli, good morning and welcome to our program. Thank you very much for having me. Now your book takes its title from the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhi and the idea of the equality of all things. What exactly do you mean by that, the equality of all things?
Uh the quality of all things, uh the title, as you as you say, is stolen for an ancient uh uh philosophy book, the Swansea. Um and it refers to the fact that I think one important message of modern science is that uh we should not think of the world in terms of uh big separations uh like uh matter and spirit. uh language and reality, uh the heaven and the earth, the animals and the humans, nature and culture. All these uh splits are only perspectival or only different perspectives on uh a unique thing um So first is the idea of naturalism, uh, all is part of a single thing, uh, which today we call nature and uh ancient China calls uh the flow of the Tao. But there is more, um, which is that in the book of Tuansi there's a strong accent on perspective, perspectivalism.
This unique thing uh which is a reality, we view it um through always through a perspective, because we are part of it. And therefore we'll never have a full picture of reality. We have only a perspectival picture of reality. We pieces of reality look at the rest of reality and have our own perspective on it.
But isn't it important to be able to live your life with those rules of the reality that we perceive? If you go into quantum physics and you're looking at the possibility that an object can be in two places at the one time, whatever that time may be, if you try to live life in the modern world in that way, it would be impossible. Why would it be? Um I mean I'm going to meet you on Tuesday outside Harrod's and you turn up on Wednesday outside Selfridge's. It wouldn't work. Uh
perspective perspectively doesn't mean arbitrariness. Um it means a deeper understanding of the world where you always realize that what you see, you see it from a perspective. Um
How does Rovelli explain the relational view of reality versus absolute objects?
And if you try to get rid of the perspective and get to some objectivity, of course you can, because uh we all agree on so many things, and that's good, that's solid, that's uh uh that's how we m b construct our beliefs about the world. And yet, if we think that at the end of the day we can get to an absolute final reality, the final total complete description of reality and that is accessible to us, we make a mistake. And that's not so surprising and is not so far away from our world because uh isn't our common experience that we have just some information about the world, others have other information, so we have a very partial view of reality and Never certain view of reality. Uh, we never have certainty about everything.
We have reliable information, but we don't get to the bottom. And in a sense, physics historically seemed to have uh give us a way to guarantee objectivity. At the end of the day, the world is just atoms and moving in space. Um, but that is what. Science physics seemed to suggest a century ago, modern science remarkably has discovered that precisely in physics, which was a more objective of sciences, precisely physics is telling us that when we look at in details of nature and the quantum phenomena, we discover that a complete objective description of things is not possible.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:33
2
What does “the equality of all things” mean in Carlo Rovelli’s new book?
0:33–3:26
3
How does Rovelli explain the relational view of reality versus absolute objects?
3:26–5:58
4
Why does modern physics reject a universal “now” and absolute reference frames?
5:58–8:32
5
What is the role of perspective in understanding quantum mechanics?
8:32–12:37
6
How can quantum mechanics influence everyday technology and phenomena?
12:37–15:10