90 TIME May 9/May 16, 2022
TIME OFF BOOKS
IT’S A VERY GOOD THING CARLO ROVELLI DID NOT GET
eaten by a bear in 1976—though even he admits it would
have been his own fault. Camping alone in western Can-
ada, he decided to save the money it would have cost
him to pitch his tent in a designated area. No sooner had
he prepared to settle in than the grizzly appeared. For-
tunately for Rovelli, the bear was more interested in the
easy pickings of the food supplies he had left out in the
open than it was in human prey. “I packed super rapidly,”
he says, “left the food, took my tent and backpack, ran to
the campsite, and was happy to pay the $2 it cost to camp
there.”
That $2 ensured that Rovelli remained in the world,
and—to the gratitude of millions of his modern-day read-
ers and followers—that the world got to keep Rovelli. It
turned out to be a good deal all around.
The 65-year-old research physicist now directs the
quantum- gravity research group at the Centre de Phy-
sique Théorique in Marseilles, France, and is the best-
selling author of seven books, including 2014’s Seven Brief
Lessons on Physics—which has been translated into more
than 40 languages—and the new There Are Places in the
World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, a
collection of his news paper columns.
Quick-talking and small-framed,
Rovelli is rather blasé about traf-
fi cking in the nearly hallucinogenic
concepts of his fi eld, from quantum
theory —which involves the behavior
of matter and energy at the atomic and
subatomic levels, where the precepts
of classical physics break down—to
relativity. “I’m a simple mechanic,” he
says. “In Italian that’s almost a pejora-
tive. However, I’m not the person who
thinks that science is a fundamental
explanation of everything. I think sci-
entists should be humble. They are
not the masters of today’s knowledge.”
Maybe not. And yet, Rovelli’s life’s
goal is to be the fi rst physicist to rec-
oncile quantum mechanics and more
traditional theories of gravity and
Einsteinian space-time. That work,
should he achieve it, would make
Rovelli more than just an accom-
plished physicist and a gifted
communicator. It would make him
a legend.ROVELLI BEGAN BREAKING RULES
long before he pitched his tent in a
place he wasn’t supposed to. Born in
Bologna, Italy, he ran away from home
at age 14 and hitchhiked across Europe.
At 16, he began experimenting with
LSD, which he credits with fi rst allow-
ing him to understand that linear time,
as we experience it, may not be all there
is. And once he enrolled in college, at
the University of Bologna, he decided
to study physics rather than philoso-
phy because the queue at the registra-
tion table was shorter.
“Physics was a little bit of a random
choice,” he says. “I also discovered, to
my surprise, that I was good at it.”
Good indeed. Rovelli has come to
conclude that if you want to under-
stand how the universe works—and
he would very much be happy to teach
you—it’s important to grasp three es-
sential concepts. First, things don’t
happen according to exact equations,
but rather only to probability. Next,
space-time is not a continuum but is
ultimately reducible to “grains,” theESSAYS
Kisses, not stones
BY JEFFREY KLUGER
◁Carlo Rovelli would
be happy to teach you
how the universe worksRovelli’s
new book
is his
seventh
▽
ROVELLI: BASSO CANNARSA; BROWN: MICHAEL SMIY