Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli - a review

Although the word 'brief' appears in the title of this book as it does in Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Carlo Rovelli's book wins hands down in the brevity stakes. Many people gave up on A Brief History of Time half way through; Seven Brief Lessons is just 81 pages long (including the preface, excluding the index), so 40 pages is not challenging.

It is the runaway success of this book (a million copies in 31 languages) that prompted Rovelli to write a longer book, The Order of Time, which I reviewed recently (in three parts, Pt 1, Pt 2 and Pt 3). Yet Seven Brief Lessons is the one that turned a theoretical physicist into a pop-science superstar of the same magnitude as Hawking. It is a slim volume, comparable to a collection of poems, which several reviewers have alluded to.

For like The Order of Time, it is a book that often strays from the strict confines of theoretical physics into a world of curiosity and wonder, a world where metaphor yields more enlightenment than equations. The key question for the lay reader is: Is this book accessible to me? It depends on how well versed you are in notions such as spacetime, quantum mechanics, the nature of elementary particles and black holes. If these are not new to you, you will undoubtedly gain new insights into how science currently sees matter, the universe, time and our place within these. If you understand space as being a big empty box in which stars are randomly distributed, and atoms consisting of just electrons whizzing around a nucleus consisting of neutrons and protons, you'll need to catch up.

Help is at hand. I cannot envisage reading any science book without a laptop or desktop PC (or even smartphone now) through which I can get at Wikipedia. More than any other thing on the internet, Wikipedia I cherish most. So much knowledge, well curated, well linked, so instructive. If only Wikipedia had been around when I was growing up...

Rovelli's great gift is to be able to link science with literature, with the poetic insights of the classics - written at a time before science, yet containing instinctive, intuitive appreciation for the structure of our world and the cosmos.

Can you heat up a gravitational field, he asks. We don't - as yet - know (nor what would happen if you did). If you diffuse heat to gravitational field, he posits, space and time should... vibrate. Here, in the fifth lesson, Rovelli is writing about quantum gravity, his principle area of research. We are nearer to understanding how gravity (the attraction of one body to another) squares with quantum mechanics (the discovery of gravity waves in 2016 was a significant step forward), but not there yet.

In fact there's much we don't know, but what we do know is succinctly and poetically depicted. "Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth," writes Rovelli in the final chapter, which is about we human beings on our world, a "swarm of ephemeral quanta"- who are we? Having explored the furthest reaches of the cosmos, being at the birth and death of stars, peering deep into the core of the atom, he asks the most fundamental questions about us - conscious beings, curious, thirsting knowledge, mortal, fragile.

This is a book that every intelligent person should have. It is easy to dip into, to pick up new insights, to use as a framework for further investigations through Wikipedia. It provokes profound thoughts that we should never let go of in our mundane everyday existence.

Costing little more than a pint of beer in a London pub, it brings you a few steps closer towards understanding infinity and eternity, and our discreet, quantum-like place within them. Order online now, you'll not be disappointed.

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