Comment

May 29, 2019AJ_Owens rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
Rovelli offers a capsule history of relativity and quantum theory, using clear examples and illustrations, and with due caveats adds his own ideas. As a non-physicist, I found the book helpful, but the concepts (such as time resulting from a process that is somehow not in time) remain difficult and puzzling. The book features some mild editorializing about blind acceptance and religion. Surprisingly, Rovelli later applies the same criticism to physicists who assume that time and space are continuous rather than discrete. Rovelli is clearly knowledgeable on Ancient Greek philosophy, and the book invokes Democritus almost as a patron saint. But one remark about Plato being "off-track" deserves comment, because it goes to the heart of larger themes in the book. The passage in Plato (Phaedo 96ff) involves Socrates' response to Democritus (indirectly, since Plato never mentions Democritus). Socrates laments that Anaxagoras, after promising to investigate Mind as the cause of things, actually traces the causes of human action to "bones and sinews." Recently sentenced to death, he adds movingly: "Or again, if he tried to account in the same way for my conversing with you, adducing causes such as sound and air and hearing and a thousand others, and never troubled to mention the real reasons, which are that since Athens has thought it better to condemn me, therefore I for my part have thought it better to sit here, and more right to submit to whatever penalty she orders." This is a critique of materialism that still resonates today. Ironically, later in the book, Rovelli says in context of Democritus that "the nature of man is not his internal structure but the network of personal, familial, and social interactions within which he exists." Perhaps that is what Plato was saying when he went "off-track." Rovelli quotes the modern philosopher Nelson Goodman approvingly: ""An object is a monotonous process." Goodman was a pupil of Alfred North Whitehead, a mathematician familiar with the development of relativity and quantum mechanics in the early 20th century. Links between Whitehead's idea of process and Rovelli's may be worth exploring. Notably, Whitehead also held that time is discrete, and not infinitely divisible.