Anne Strainchamps: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
Anne Strainchamps: I'm Anne Strainchamps.
Steve Paulson: And I'm Steve Paulson.
Anne Strainchamps: Where do you go when you need a dose of wonder?
Steve Paulson: A way to lift your spirits, let go of the day's heaviness.
Anne Strainchamps: Well, the biggest frame of reference we have is the cosmos,
Anne Strainchamps: an entire universe of expanded horizons and limitless possibility.
Steve Paulson: Where time flows differently, space bends and curves,
Steve Paulson: and reality is so much more than what our senses tell us.
Anne Strainchamps: Imagine you're a theoretical physicist.
Anne Strainchamps: You spend your whole life on the edge of all that wonder.
Anne Strainchamps: Every day you wake up and you do your best to understand it just a little bit better.
Anne Strainchamps: Maybe even discover something new.
Anne Strainchamps: What was it like for you to see that first photograph of the black hole?
Anne Strainchamps: Do you remember?
Carlo Rovelli: Yes, it was an incredible emotion.
Carlo Rovelli: It's like, you know, we've been studying an animal, mysterious all your life,
Carlo Rovelli: and then you see it.
Carlo Rovelli: Well, it exists, it's real.
Steve Paulson: This is Carlo Rovelli, and he is one of the world's most celebrated physicists.
Steve Paulson: Author of a string of best-selling books, including
Steve Paulson: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality is Not What It Seems, and The Order of Time.
Anne Strainchamps: We thought we would start this hour by playing this little story
Anne Strainchamps: that he told me a few years ago about one of his own favorite moments of wonder.
Carlo Rovelli: The best experience has not been the picture of the black hole,
Carlo Rovelli: which is a few years ago,
Carlo Rovelli: but a little bit before that,
Carlo Rovelli: there was the announcement of the detection of the gravitational waves
Carlo Rovelli: that was produced by a black hole.
Carlo Rovelli: Since there are so many black holes in the sky,
Carlo Rovelli: they can meet and fall into one another.
Carlo Rovelli: They fall into one another,
Carlo Rovelli: they start orbiting, turning around,
Carlo Rovelli: then orbiting faster and faster, getting closer and closer,
Carlo Rovelli: faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, closer, closer, closer,
Carlo Rovelli: then whoop!
Carlo Rovelli: They just eat each other, so to say.
Carlo Rovelli: And if they do so,
Carlo Rovelli: they produce this enormously strong oscillation of space,
Carlo Rovelli: which is what was detected.
Carlo Rovelli: The announcement of that was given publicly,
Carlo Rovelli: and the press conference was during a class
Carlo Rovelli: I was giving to my students in Marseille on general relativity.
Carlo Rovelli: So I told the students,
Carlo Rovelli: look, there is this press conference,
Carlo Rovelli: they say they have gravitational waves,
Carlo Rovelli: they have not seen what they have seen,
Carlo Rovelli: they say they have seen.
Carlo Rovelli: And I turned the computer on
Carlo Rovelli: in front of the class.
Carlo Rovelli: But before, I gave them the theory.
Carlo Rovelli: I explained to them that the black hole can merge,
Carlo Rovelli: and they produce this wave,
Carlo Rovelli: and oscillations, which first is slow and weak,
Carlo Rovelli: and then become faster and higher.
Carlo Rovelli: So if it was a sound,
Carlo Rovelli: it would be something like,
Carlo Rovelli: whoop!
Carlo Rovelli: It's a chirp,
Carlo Rovelli: the chirp of the black hole.
Carlo Rovelli: Whip!
Carlo Rovelli: And I drew the shape of this wave of the black hole.
Carlo Rovelli: Then we turned the computer on
Carlo Rovelli: to the press conference.
Narrator: The black holes are getting closer and closer to one another.
Narrator: There is great emotion.
Narrator: They're going to merge.
Narrator: Boom.
Narrator: The first time that this has ever been seen.
Narrator: As I said,
Narrator: we can hear gravitational waves.
Narrator: We can hear the universe.
Narrator: And this is a signal that we have measured.
Narrator: There's the rumbling noise,
Narrator: and then there's the chirp.
Carlo Rovelli: The shape of the wave appears,
Carlo Rovelli: and is exactly equal to the shape of the chirp of the black hole.
Carlo Rovelli: Whoop!
Carlo Rovelli: That's the chirp we've been looking for.
Carlo Rovelli: And the students,
Carlo Rovelli: it was a class of 20, 30 students,
Carlo Rovelli: all together,
Carlo Rovelli: wow!
Carlo Rovelli: What?
Carlo Rovelli: There's like science at its best,
Carlo Rovelli: when you're really,
Carlo Rovelli: when you're really science,
Carlo Rovelli: it's shining.
Narrator: Gravitational waves.
Narrator: We did it.
Steve Paulson: That is an episode we did on
Steve Paulson: To the Best of Our Knowledge a while back,
Steve Paulson: and today we are excited to bring you
Steve Paulson: a brand new conversation with Carlo Rovelli.
Anne Strainchamps: Recorded at the Island of Knowledge in Italy,
Steve Paulson: Which, to be clear,
Steve Paulson: is not an actual island.
Steve Paulson: It's a small think tank in Tuscany
Steve Paulson: where three times a year,
Steve Paulson: small groups of scientists and philosophers
Steve Paulson: come together to explore some really big questions.
Steve Paulson: And this time,
Steve Paulson: Rovelli was there.
Carlo Rovelli: What do you want to talk about?
Carlo Rovelli: What's the topic?
Steve Paulson: You.
Carlo Rovelli: Oh boy.
Carlo Rovelli: Okay.
Steve Paulson: So I want to take you back
Steve Paulson: to your early years as a scientist.
Steve Paulson: Why did you want to become a physicist?
Carlo Rovelli: That was not an early call.
Carlo Rovelli: My actual plan after high school
Carlo Rovelli: was to go traveling the world.
Carlo Rovelli: My ambition was to become a beggar.
Steve Paulson: Really?
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.
Steve Paulson: Travel around the world,
Steve Paulson: I don't know.
Carlo Rovelli: As a beggar.
Steve Paulson: The modern St. Francis,
Steve Paulson: holding out your hat.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, exactly.
Carlo Rovelli: You got it right.
Carlo Rovelli: It was not a lack of esteem in myself.
Carlo Rovelli: It was an overestimation.
Carlo Rovelli: The models were St. Francis or Buddha, right?
Carlo Rovelli: So it was an overambition.
Steve Paulson: So I have read that
Steve Paulson: one of your formative experiences,
Steve Paulson: probably more than one,
Steve Paulson: is psychedelics.
Steve Paulson: When you were a teenager,
Steve Paulson: LSD in particular?
Carlo Rovelli: Well, psychedelics is even before that.
Steve Paulson: Okay.
Carlo Rovelli: In fact, I was a teenager.
Carlo Rovelli: I was 16.
Steve Paulson: Ah.
Carlo Rovelli: I got into that because the little I read about it
Carlo Rovelli: sounded completely fascinating,
Carlo Rovelli: the idea of exploring state of consciousness,
Carlo Rovelli: seeing the world differently,
Carlo Rovelli: going with the mind, who knows where.
Carlo Rovelli: These were the early 70s.
Carlo Rovelli: I grew up in Verona.
Carlo Rovelli: It was a sort of provincial small town in Italy.
Carlo Rovelli: But I was visiting Paris.
Carlo Rovelli: And then a friend of a friend, you know,
Carlo Rovelli: said, oh, maybe I can get some LSD.
Carlo Rovelli: There is somebody,
Carlo Rovelli: people called Los Pagnole, the Spanish.
Carlo Rovelli: I'll ask for him.
Carlo Rovelli: So he sold us these little pieces of paper
Carlo Rovelli: and we have no idea whether he's just cheating us.
Steve Paulson: Oh, these were like the acid blotters.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, exactly.
Carlo Rovelli: That was a first.
Carlo Rovelli: And it was a spectacular experience.
Carlo Rovelli: It was extremely powerful,
Carlo Rovelli: which left a big impact on me.
Steve Paulson: Why did it make such an impact on you?
Carlo Rovelli: It upset my sense of what I knew about reality entirely.
Carlo Rovelli: I was very young.
Carlo Rovelli: I mean, this was before my first girlfriend.
Steve Paulson: Yeah.
Steve Paulson: I mean, 16.That's
16.
Steve Paulson: young to start taking psychedelics,
Steve Paulson: LSD in particular.
Carlo Rovelli: It is young, yes.
Carlo Rovelli: I had the good fortune of a friend
Carlo Rovelli: that gave me the simplest, best instruction about it.
Carlo Rovelli: He said, look, whatever happens, don't worry, don't panic,
Carlo Rovelli: don't resist, let it go.
Carlo Rovelli: You're going to come back.
Carlo Rovelli: So, I mean, there was a first phase in which just dancing colors
Carlo Rovelli: and, you know, the houses becoming fat and beautiful.
Carlo Rovelli: All this.
Steve Paulson: Right.
Steve Paulson: What were solid lines became wavy.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, everything wavy and all this theater.
Carlo Rovelli: And we were, the three of us, super happy.
Carlo Rovelli: And then, but that was only the beginning.
Carlo Rovelli: Then at some point, I felt this wave arriving on me
Carlo Rovelli: and I just sat down under a tree.
Carlo Rovelli: We were in a park in the night
Carlo Rovelli: and put my hands in front of my eyes
Carlo Rovelli: and just felt that I was going totally elsewhere.
Carlo Rovelli: I remember the first images were this huge red color
Carlo Rovelli: that was opening and me going in and then closing behind me,
Carlo Rovelli: and then this blue screen and opening and me going.
Carlo Rovelli: And I said, oh boy, what's going on here?
Carlo Rovelli: There was nothing of what was familiar around.
Carlo Rovelli: No space, no time, no myself.
Carlo Rovelli: With incredible beauty, incredible emotion,
Carlo Rovelli: incredible intensity.
Steve Paulson: Was it a single experience or did you have a few more like that?
Carlo Rovelli: No, I repeated it.
Carlo Rovelli: I'm talking about the first one
Carlo Rovelli: because it was really the one which opened up a world for me.
Carlo Rovelli: I repeated it not many times,
Carlo Rovelli: maybe in my life less than 10 times during my youth.
Carlo Rovelli: Then I stopped.
Carlo Rovelli: What did I take away from that?
Carlo Rovelli: You know, I do quantum gravity.
Carlo Rovelli: I do fundamental physics.
Carlo Rovelli: What is space?
Carlo Rovelli: What is time?
Steve Paulson: This seems like good training.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, exactly.
Steve Paulson: To become a theoretical physicist,
Steve Paulson: to question the nature of reality.
Carlo Rovelli: In a sense, yes.
Carlo Rovelli: I think there was a liberating, intellectually liberating thing.
Carlo Rovelli: The sense that reality can be profoundly different from our
Carlo Rovelli: everyday view of reality, probably rooted in that,
Carlo Rovelli: I've always felt is like our sleepwalking without seeing what's behind it.
Steve Paulson: I mean, you're talking about experiences you had 50 years ago.
Carlo Rovelli: I'm talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Steve Paulson: And you're saying you still think about those.
Carlo Rovelli: I still think about that.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.
Steve Paulson: So you went on, of course, to become a major theoretical physicist.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, much later.
Carlo Rovelli: I went to physics 10 years later.
Steve Paulson: But it sounds like those experiences maybe helped push you in the direction
Steve Paulson: of wanting to become a physicist.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, maybe.
Carlo Rovelli: I was, yeah, sure.
Carlo Rovelli: I was rebellious as a kid.
Carlo Rovelli: I grew up in a loving family and in a provincial Italy, a bit fascist.
Carlo Rovelli: I was covered by love by my mother.
Carlo Rovelli: You know, love is the greatest thing around, but sometimes it's heavy.
Carlo Rovelli: I needed to run away.
Carlo Rovelli: The same summer in Paris, I met a friend from Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria,
Carlo Rovelli: which at the time was on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Carlo Rovelli: It was the Soviet world.
Carlo Rovelli: We went into enormous political discussions and he kept saying,
Carlo Rovelli: yeah, you should come and see.
Carlo Rovelli: And so I decided to go.
Carlo Rovelli: So at 16, alone, I hitchhiked through Europe from Paris to Sofia,
Carlo Rovelli: a thousand kilometers, sleeping in the fields.
Carlo Rovelli: I crossed into the Soviet world.
Carlo Rovelli: And that was another liberating, mind liberating experience for me.
Carlo Rovelli: I realized that the Soviet world was nothing like we were told
Carlo Rovelli: by the Western propaganda.
Carlo Rovelli: But the shocking thing was that the Soviet propaganda was describing
Carlo Rovelli: a Western world, which is nothing like my experience.
Carlo Rovelli: So I realized that Europe was living at the time split in two parts.
Carlo Rovelli: Each one was telling a story about the other, which is completely fake.
Carlo Rovelli: And since then, I became very sensitive to propaganda somehow.
Carlo Rovelli: I listen to the news.
Carlo Rovelli: And even today, I spend my time listening to news from all over the world.
Carlo Rovelli: I regularly make the tour.
Carlo Rovelli: I listen to the Chinese, to the Indians, to the Brazilian, to the Iranians,
Carlo Rovelli: to the South Africans, to the Americans, the British, the Italian.
Carlo Rovelli: And it's so obvious that everybody's telling stories.
Steve Paulson: Well, and it's just, I mean, going back to those early years, too.
Steve Paulson: You said you started getting really interested in politics.
Steve Paulson: I mean, I know you became a student radical.
Steve Paulson: I mean, literally, manning the barricades.
Carlo Rovelli: I was a student radical.
Carlo Rovelli: There was a rebellion movement in Italy in the late 70s,
Carlo Rovelli: which was a long way from the sort of the 60s.
Carlo Rovelli: So, yes, I was involved in this radical politics.
Carlo Rovelli: I was fascinated by radical movements.
Carlo Rovelli: I mean, from Che Guevara to Mao Zedong, I was that generation.
Steve Paulson: And you were arrested at one point, right, for refusing military service?
Carlo Rovelli: I was arrested for refusing military service because I was strongly pacifist in that sense.
Carlo Rovelli: I don't believe in borders, even today.
Carlo Rovelli: I don't believe in patria.
Carlo Rovelli: They say I'm not patriotic.
Steve Paulson: Patriotism.
Carlo Rovelli: I don't believe in patriotism.
Carlo Rovelli: I believe in the fact that we are a single tribe all over the planet.
Steve Paulson: So, I want to come back to this.
Steve Paulson: I want to come back to politics.
Steve Paulson: But I want to spend a little bit of time talking about your work as a physicist.
Carlo Rovelli: Well, that was somehow the moment of political engagement ended up with quite a disappointment.
Carlo Rovelli: To put it brutally, we wanted to change the world,
Carlo Rovelli: make a revolution for a more gentle world without weapons, without borders.
Carlo Rovelli: And we failed.
Carlo Rovelli: We lost the revolution.
Carlo Rovelli: So, I had to find something else to do.
Carlo Rovelli: And at that precise moment, I fell in love with physics.
Carlo Rovelli: It was madly falling in love with physics.
Steve Paulson: Why did you fall in love with physics?
Carlo Rovelli: Because quantum mechanics and general relativity are the most beautiful human creations.
Carlo Rovelli: First, Einstein theory.
Carlo Rovelli: General relativity is incredibly spectacular.
Carlo Rovelli: It's better than LSD.
Carlo Rovelli: I mean, it's telling that reality is profoundly different than what we instinctively think.
Carlo Rovelli: But in a way, that works so well.
Carlo Rovelli: I mean, there's this curving of space, stretching on time.
Carlo Rovelli: And yet, this works fantastically to describe things which are really in the universe.
Carlo Rovelli: Gravitation waves, black holes, suspenseful universe.
Steve Paulson: So, it was the sense that you were getting closer to what the nature of reality was?
Steve Paulson: Was that the fascination?
Steve Paulson: Or was it sort of at a mathematical level?
Carlo Rovelli: No, it was not mathematics.
Carlo Rovelli: I would have never been fascinated by mathematics.
Carlo Rovelli: I'm bored by mathematics.
Carlo Rovelli: I'm not a good mathematician.
Carlo Rovelli: I have to struggle through mathematics.
Steve Paulson: But it's sort of, my sense is, it's sort of like, I mean, the great thing about theoretical
Steve Paulson: physics is, I mean, you're sort of cracking the code in a sense of, you know, how all of
Steve Paulson: this, you know, is structured, came into being in a way, right?
Carlo Rovelli: Yes and no.
Carlo Rovelli: I would say it's a strong feeling of raising a veil and seeing something that you couldn't
Carlo Rovelli: see before.
Carlo Rovelli: Understanding profoundly better reality.
Carlo Rovelli: But that doesn't mean cracking the code.
Carlo Rovelli: And I never thought, and I still don't think, that science is getting at the bottom of things.
Carlo Rovelli: It's getting one more layer.
Carlo Rovelli: But maybe there's another layer.
Carlo Rovelli: There's another layer again.
Carlo Rovelli: I don't like the idea that we are getting to the bottom.
Steve Paulson: Well, I'm surprised that you say that because, I mean, your work on quantum gravity, I mean,
Steve Paulson: one of the things that you're famous for is this effort to reconcile these two
Steve Paulson: reigning models of physics, of general relativity and quantum mechanics, which, you know, no
Steve Paulson: one has figured out how to sort of bring those two together.
Carlo Rovelli: Exactly.
Carlo Rovelli: And I think that there is a way of putting the two together.
Carlo Rovelli: That's what basically I spent my life on.
Carlo Rovelli: I've been paid all my life for trying.
Carlo Rovelli: And with friends and colleagues, we have a tentative way of bringing together quantum mechanics and Einstein
Carlo Rovelli: theories.
Carlo Rovelli: General relativity, I hope it works.
Carlo Rovelli: I hope it's good.
Carlo Rovelli: And I think it is understanding something more about the world, something deeper about
Carlo Rovelli: the world.
Carlo Rovelli: But look, if you have a girlfriend, you understand her better.
Carlo Rovelli: Do you really think you know everything about her?
Steve Paulson: No, of course not.
Carlo Rovelli: And so it's with reality.
Carlo Rovelli: It's
Carlo Rovelli: like with the girlfriend.
Carlo Rovelli: And it's wonderful when you open your eyes, when you communicate with a person.
Carlo Rovelli: And it's equally wonderful when you communicate with nature.
Carlo Rovelli: You see something about nature you didn't see before.
Carlo Rovelli: So, general relativity is this kind of discovery.
Carlo Rovelli: Wow, we realize that this idea of a rigid space in which we are in a common time, this
Carlo Rovelli: is all approximation.
Carlo Rovelli: It's not the reality, right?
Carlo Rovelli: It's far more complicated than that.
Carlo Rovelli: So, you see beyond it, and you see more.
Carlo Rovelli: But I don't have the ambition that I've got looking to,, talking to God
Carlo Rovelli: and getting to the bottom.
Steve Paulson: I mean, no, you know, not finding ultimate reality, but maybe getting a little closer
Steve Paulson: to what is real.
Carlo Rovelli: A little better understanding of this abyssal thing.
Carlo Rovelli: We don't know the fundamental law of quantum gravity yet.
Carlo Rovelli: We don't have a unified theory.
Carlo Rovelli: So, there's so many things we don't know.
Carlo Rovelli: We live in an open, marvelous, beautiful, mysterious, sacred universe of which we understand a lot.
Carlo Rovelli: And we are happy to understand a lot.
Carlo Rovelli: It is an incredibly beautiful feeling to understand more.
Carlo Rovelli: And I want to contribute to understand more.
Steve Paulson: So, we're at a scientific conference right now in Italy, 30 miles south of Siena.
Carlo Rovelli: Beautiful countryside.
Steve Paulson: Beautiful countryside.
Steve Paulson: We're part of this Island of Knowledge think tank.
Steve Paulson: And the point of this particular meeting that we're at is asking some really big questions.
Steve Paulson: One is, is there ultimate reality?
Steve Paulson: I mean, that is one of the questions that's been put on the table here.
Steve Paulson: And I have to say, you had a fascinating answer to that.
Steve Paulson: I mean, you said when you were young, this was an agonizing question for you.
Steve Paulson: But no longer.
Steve Paulson: You say it's a bad question and we should not ask that question.
Steve Paulson: So, before we get to why you say this is a bad question,
Steve Paulson: I want to take you back to when you were young and when you agonized over that question.
Steve Paulson: Okay.
Steve Paulson: While Carlo thinks about this, we're going to take a short break.
We'll be right back.
Anne Strainchamps: Hi, it's Anne. I am so glad you're joining us.
Anne Strainchamps: We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead.
Anne Strainchamps: I'm really excited about them.
Anne Strainchamps: And here's a tip. Maybe you know this already,
Anne Strainchamps: but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts,
Anne Strainchamps: those new episodes will show up automatically,
Anne Strainchamps: like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed.
Anne Strainchamps: I hope you like it.
Steve Paulson: I'm Steve Paulson, and we are back with theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, who has been thinking
Steve Paulson: about why he was consumed by questions about ultimate reality when he was young.
Carlo Rovelli: Yes, I had a difficult adolescence.
Carlo Rovelli: I disliked the adults around me.
Carlo Rovelli: I couldn't understand why they were doing what they were doing.
Carlo Rovelli: Everybody had great, beautiful ideals to talk about, and they seemed to me all to be fake
Carlo Rovelli: and incredibly hypocritical.
Carlo Rovelli: So I was very confused about the world, about everything.
Carlo Rovelli: And this confusion grew, in a sense.
Carlo Rovelli: And the desire to put order and understanding was very strong.
Carlo Rovelli: And I remember that I had this strong sense, there should be a truth somewhere.
Carlo Rovelli: I want to go for the truth.
Carlo Rovelli: This has been a...
Carlo Rovelli: If I read back, I have been writing all my life a lot, just for myself, notebook and notebook.
Carlo Rovelli: And this idea, I want to try to go for the truth, it's all over my writing.
Carlo Rovelli: I don't want to fake it.
Carlo Rovelli: I don't want to become hypocritical.
Carlo Rovelli: And I want to search.
Carlo Rovelli: That was also the spirit of the time.
Carlo Rovelli: We were all searching.
Carlo Rovelli: This is all in search.
Steve Paulson: But I'm sure you're searching now, but it sounds like it's a very different way now.
Steve Paulson: So I'm trying to figure out.
It is a big...
Steve Paulson: What was the nature of that search?
Carlo Rovelli: I'm getting there.
Carlo Rovelli: I'm still searching, right?
Carlo Rovelli: I'm paid for searching.
Carlo Rovelli: I was so lucky that I then got a job to search.
Carlo Rovelli: But I'm not searching for the ultimate reality.
Carlo Rovelli: I'm searching for understanding of something more.
Carlo Rovelli: And I think the idea of the ultimate reality in science, like in philosophy, it's a bad idea.
Carlo Rovelli: Nowadays, I'm more and more interested in philosophy.
Carlo Rovelli: I go to philosophy conferences.
Carlo Rovelli: This is very philosophical, this meeting.
Carlo Rovelli: I'm invited by philosophy departments.
Carlo Rovelli: I write in philosophy journals.
Carlo Rovelli: And I read a huge amount of philosophy.
Carlo Rovelli: And the idea of getting to the bottom, understanding the ultimate nature of reality, what is nature, what is fundamental?
Carlo Rovelli: It's matter, spirit, it's God, it's perception, it's consciousness, it's language.
Carlo Rovelli: None of this is fundamental.
Carlo Rovelli: It's like when we're talking about music before, right?
Carlo Rovelli: I'm not a musician.
Carlo Rovelli: Suppose I was a musician.
Carlo Rovelli: I want to write better and better music.
Carlo Rovelli: Do I want to write the ultimate music?
Carlo Rovelli: No, there's no ultimate music.
Carlo Rovelli: But there is better music.
Carlo Rovelli: And I think there is better knowledge.
Carlo Rovelli: Einstein is better than Newton.
Carlo Rovelli: Newton is very good.
Carlo Rovelli: He’s super, super good and still used a lot.
Carlo Rovelli: Einstein is better.
Carlo Rovelli: It's a deeper look into reality.
Carlo Rovelli: And if all goes right, quantum gravity is a little step ahead.
Carlo Rovelli: Can't we be happy with the lack of knowledge?
Steve Paulson: Was that something that came, this appreciation of not knowing?
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.
Steve Paulson: Did that come with age?
Carlo Rovelli: With age, maybe it's just, you know, you get relaxed with age.
Steve Paulson: I'm asking this out of genuine curiosity because I'll tell you a little bit about my own personal history.
Steve Paulson: So when I was 17, 18, 19, I was obsessed with the existential writers, you know, those kind of depressing European writers.
Steve Paulson: Camus, Dostoevsky, Kafka, you know, all those guys.
Steve Paulson: Like The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus is sort of this foundational book for me.
Steve Paulson: And that quest for meaning was hugely important.
Steve Paulson: I agonized over that.
Steve Paulson: And I don't anymore.
Steve Paulson: And I've puzzled over that.
Steve Paulson: I mean, you know, maybe I'm wiser now.
Steve Paulson: There’s a lot of lived experience.
Steve Paulson: Since then, you know, I can sort of rationalize this.
Steve Paulson: Or maybe I'm just a little jaded and life isn't as raw as it once was.
Steve Paulson: I'm kind of a little more comfortable.
Steve Paulson: And I don't maybe feel like I need to ask those big questions anymore.
Steve Paulson: So I'm interested in your response partly because you're interested in time, and age and time go together.
Steve Paulson: And I'm just wondering, yeah, we're wiser, I guess, as we're older.
Steve Paulson: But do we also lose something when we no longer have that rawness of being young?
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.
Carlo Rovelli: I don't know.
Carlo Rovelli: I don't know which one of these is.
Carlo Rovelli: It's probably a combination of those.
Carlo Rovelli: And I actually have asked the same question to myself.
Carlo Rovelli: To some extent, yes.
Carlo Rovelli: You know, I'm much older and happier.
Steve Paulson: Right.
Steve Paulson: I would never want to go back to those years.
Steve Paulson: Yeah.
Carlo Rovelli: It's nothing as hard as being a 20-year-old boy, especially if girls are not.
Carlo Rovelli: And life has been nice.
Carlo Rovelli: And I'm more content with what I have.
Carlo Rovelli: So that's one thing.
Carlo Rovelli: Another thing is historical.
Carlo Rovelli: I mean, that period I remember very well.
Carlo Rovelli: I also was reading Sartre and Camus and all this anguish.
Carlo Rovelli: And Dostoevsky was my absolute - is still now - my preferred writer.
Carlo Rovelli: That was the after Second World War, when Europe had just committed a dramatic suicide in two acts,
Carlo Rovelli: First and Second World War.
Carlo Rovelli: The European intellectual scene was totally confused and desperate.
Carlo Rovelli: What have we done?
Carlo Rovelli: We thought we were the pinnacle of civilization and master of the world and ourselves.
Carlo Rovelli: And the only thing we were able to do is to massacre one another and destroy the continent.
Carlo Rovelli: I mean, this is a moment of profound spiritual dispersion and being lost.
Carlo Rovelli: The times have changed.
Carlo Rovelli: We're not in much better times.
Carlo Rovelli: We're probably going to the same horror again.
Carlo Rovelli: But besides the two things, I think it was a real intellectual step ahead for me.
Carlo Rovelli: Reading philosophers like Wittgenstein or Nagarjuna, a great Buddhist philosopher, had a big, big intellectual impact on me.
Carlo Rovelli: And both of them, from completely different traditions, from completely different, two millennia of difference between the two,
Carlo Rovelli: in common, they have this message, which is, you know, be very careful because you're asking questions which are meaningless.
Carlo Rovelli: And you're torturing yourself on questions which are meaningless.
Steve Paulson: So one thing that some people who are sort of searching for that, I don't want to call it ultimate reality, but deeper reality,
Steve Paulson: is they seek out transcendent experiences.
Steve Paulson: I mean, it could be psychedelics.
Steve Paulson: It could be something else.
Steve Paulson: And does transcendence, does that have resonance for you or transcendent experiences, are those important to you?
Carlo Rovelli: I was thinking this morning, because I was talking about that. There are certain experiences which are, you know, powerful, changing,
Carlo Rovelli: taking you outside your normal reality.
Carlo Rovelli: There are mystical experiences, there are psychedelic experiences, or even, you know, when you're completely in love.
Carlo Rovelli: So we have an everyday life we go through and then something breaks and we see something completely new, completely different,
Carlo Rovelli: elsewhere, it's true.
Carlo Rovelli: Now, is this transcendence in the sense that I should think of the world as the material reality here, which I see every day,
Carlo Rovelli: and something else, which I rarely, no, no, no.
Carlo Rovelli: I don't think that there is any substantial metaphysical break of the world between immanent and transcendent,
Carlo Rovelli: between mind and matter, between spirit and body.
Steve Paulson: So going back to, like, your first LSD experience when you were 17, it changed the way you think.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.
Steve Paulson: But it didn't, you don't necessarily think it sort of put you in touch with some deeper sense of reality.
Carlo Rovelli: Not any more than the way the first time I looked into the microscope and what looked like water,
Carlo Rovelli: to my astonishment, everybody's gone through that.
Carlo Rovelli: You know, there's little bugs moving there, there's incredible richness of things happening.
Carlo Rovelli: And wow, I've, yes, I've seen more of reality, but it's not transcendent.
Carlo Rovelli: It's just, you know, bugs down there swimming in the water.
Steve Paulson: It's amazement is what it sounds like.
It's amazement.
Carlo Rovelli: It's amazement and it's the realization that reality is far more complex than what we view in our day life.
Carlo Rovelli: So I think this is a point.
Carlo Rovelli: If we think that what reality is, is this cup, this table, you and I, a conversation, day and night,
Carlo Rovelli: and that's basically what the world is about, we're completely wrong, okay?
Carlo Rovelli: That's the world, what the world is completely wrong for us at our scale at this, you know,
Carlo Rovelli: one meter, a kilometer, hundred kilometers, a few years.
Carlo Rovelli: But at just the scale of the microscope, would see, or quantum gravity would see, or the cosmos,
Carlo Rovelli: reality is far more complicated.
Carlo Rovelli: There are all these layers.
Carlo Rovelli: So once you realize that there are all these layers, all this complexity, all this,
Carlo Rovelli: to split the world into an immanent and a transcendent, it's just silly.
Carlo Rovelli: I mean, there's more richness than that.
Steve Paulson: So I want to come back.
Steve Paulson: I want to pick up a thread from earlier in the conversation, going back to politics.
Carlo Rovelli: Okay.
Steve Paulson: And you were saying that, you know, you were an active student radical.
Steve Paulson: At a certain point, you just felt like you and your movement had failed.
Steve Paulson: And so you went into physics at that point, you know, maybe changing the world in that sense.
Steve Paulson: But I know you have remained active politically.
Steve Paulson: I mean, a few years ago, you helped get a bunch of Nobel Prize winners to sign a letter.
Steve Paulson: I think more than 50, signing a letter, to reduce military spending and instead use that money for dealing with climate change and poverty and, you know, real social and environmental issues.
Steve Paulson: And I guess I'm wondering if that's, is that just an entirely separate enterprise from what you do as a physicist?
Steve Paulson: Or are they connected in some way?
Carlo Rovelli: Well, for me, they're connected because that's all me.
Carlo Rovelli: And in a sense, when I, in my late 20s, got into full immersion into science and started spending my time doing calculations and being in front of a blackboard with my friends and colleagues for days, months, years, I was missing the social engagement.
Carlo Rovelli: And I was even feeling a little bit guilty.
Carlo Rovelli: It's not, I'm not going to change the world.
Carlo Rovelli: I learned that.
Carlo Rovelli: But yet, the good part of the world is thanks to a lot of people who have believed in a better world and worked for it.
Carlo Rovelli: Worked for, I don't know, equality of human, abolition of slavery, abolition of death penalty.
Carlo Rovelli: You know, democracy didn't come for free.
Carlo Rovelli: People fought for it and so on.
Carlo Rovelli: Now, more recently, I went back to some sort of engagement like the one you mentioned.
Carlo Rovelli: Not very successful either.
Carlo Rovelli: It's the second time.
Steve Paulson: Well, in terms of actually getting countries to reduce their military spending, yeah.
Carlo Rovelli: Yes.
Carlo Rovelli: Well, the idea was, you know, the idea of that thing and all this Nobel Prize, I got the signature of 60 Nobel Prizes.
Carlo Rovelli: And the idea was not to ask your own government to reduce military spending.
Carlo Rovelli: The idea was to ask your own government to start negotiating worldwide for a global common reduction of military spending.
Carlo Rovelli: Keeping the balance of power.
Carlo Rovelli: So asking, you know, my country decreased by 2% military spending, but also our enemies, so to say, decreased.
Carlo Rovelli: So the most stupid thing we humans do is to kill one another and fight.
Carlo Rovelli: It's obvious.
Carlo Rovelli: I mean, if we collaborate, everything gets better for everybody.
Carlo Rovelli: And then we start fighting again because we're irrational.
Carlo Rovelli: I think that humankind has just one single enemy, its own irrationality that pushes one against the other one.
Carlo Rovelli: And I think the people like me who have the privilege of being paid for thinking, essentially, intellectuals of different kinds, have a duty of, you know, I've been paid for thinking.
Carlo Rovelli: So let me tell you what I'm thinking.
Carlo Rovelli: Not just on physics.
Steve Paulson: Well, yes.
Steve Paulson: I mean, I was struck by what you said, that you were starting to feel a little guilty.
Steve Paulson: And I guess the question is, feeling a little guilty if you weren't politically engaged in some way.
Steve Paulson: And it raises the question of whether, no matter how cool, how amazing the science of quantum gravity might be, is...
Carlo Rovelli: Is not the most important thing.
Steve Paulson: Yeah, I mean,
Steve Paulson: is there an ethics to this?
Steve Paulson: I don't want to get too heavy-handed here, but
Steve Paulson: how do you think about that?
Steve Paulson: I mean, it's sort of the responsibility of the intellectual, the responsibility of the scientist.
Carlo Rovelli: So the responsibility of the scientists, the physicists in particular, have the burden of the nuclear weapons that have the poisonous gift they've given to humankind, which are seriously risking today to destroy us.
Carlo Rovelli: Look, my reading of the world is that we're going toward another catastrophe.
Carlo Rovelli: The West has dominated the world for two or three centuries, is losing its power, but doesn't want to lose it.
Carlo Rovelli: So it's military-dominating, it's imposing its will on the rest of the planet, the rest of the planet is not happy.
Carlo Rovelli: This is a dramatically unstable situation.
Carlo Rovelli: And everybody's demonizing everybody else.
Carlo Rovelli: So for the Americans, the Russians are all very, very nasty, and so are the Chinese, and vice versa, and so on and so forth.
Carlo Rovelli: We have in front of us a recipe for a total disaster.
Carlo Rovelli: Now, humans sometimes are reasonable, right?
Carlo Rovelli: I mean, the Soviet Union, the United States sat down and destroyed 80% of their nuclear arsenal, not little because of the push of scientists - the physicists, feeling guilty for what they've done.
Carlo Rovelli: They said, careful, I mean, just please be reasonable.
Carlo Rovelli: And Gorbachev is on record as saying that the effect of the scientists pushed him toward that.
Carlo Rovelli: So why are we not doing the same again?
Carlo Rovelli: I think that in this moment in which belligerence is growing everywhere, any voice that raises and says, calm down, bring down the heat, discuss, sit, it's a good voice.
Steve Paulson: Yeah, yeah.
Steve Paulson: So we were talking earlier about the wonder of science.
Steve Paulson: I mean, you were just saying it was just amazing, you know, when you first got into doing physics.
Steve Paulson: Is there a politics of wonder?
Carlo Rovelli: Ah! Is there a politics of wonder?
Carlo Rovelli: Huh.
Carlo Rovelli: Probably, yes.
Carlo Rovelli: I don't know.
Carlo Rovelli: I never thought in these terms.
Carlo Rovelli: You surprised me here.
Carlo Rovelli: Wonder is something that makes you change, right?
Carlo Rovelli: It's exactly what happens when you break out from your routine.
Carlo Rovelli: You wonder because you discover a new idea, because you're a new person, because you're an experience.
Carlo Rovelli: Wonder is, for Aristotle, what starts the philosophical search.
Carlo Rovelli: Wonder triggers curiosity and triggers desire to know.
Steve Paulson: Right.
Steve Paulson: He said all philosophy starts in wonder, I believe.
Carlo Rovelli: He says all philosophy starts in wonder.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.
Carlo Rovelli: I mean, he says you wonder and then you start thinking and you start, but thinking meaning not
Carlo Rovelli: being content with the current worldview that you have?
Carlo Rovelli: I think, yes.
Carlo Rovelli: And in a sense, oversimplifying, there are two ways of going through life.
Carlo Rovelli: One is that, well, I know everything there is to know.
Carlo Rovelli: I know what I have to do.
Carlo Rovelli: And the world is what it is.
Carlo Rovelli: And politically, what is around me, it is fine, no problem.
Carlo Rovelli: And we are in a very good world from many perspectives, no doubt.
Carlo Rovelli: We have a fantastically good world, even folding in the current world and, you know, 800 million
Carlo Rovelli: people who don't have enough food today on the planet.
Carlo Rovelli: But, you know, in past centuries it was worse, thanks to people who could not take the present
Carlo Rovelli: for granted and dream something new because they had an idea that fascinated them and because
Carlo Rovelli: they had wonder.
Carlo Rovelli: And science is clearly motivated to wonder.
Carlo Rovelli: You know, there's this funny thing.
Carlo Rovelli: Scientists had to control their own emotions and they built up this picture of science, which
Carlo Rovelli: is emotionless.
Steve Paulson: Right.
Steve Paulson: You're going to corrupt the science if you let your emotions into it.
Carlo Rovelli: You're going to corrupt the science, which to some extent is true, but emotions are
Carlo Rovelli: the fuel that pushes science.
Carlo Rovelli: Otherwise, who would be interested in learning something else?
Carlo Rovelli: Because you're curious, because you want to look at the planet and you say, why do they
Carlo Rovelli: go around that way around us?
Carlo Rovelli: You know, you study general relativity, wow.
Carlo Rovelli: And then you say, how does it go together with quantum?
Carlo Rovelli: And so on.
Carlo Rovelli: Is this, and it makes our life so much better, right?
Carlo Rovelli: To some extent, children who wonder all the time have a wonderful life.
Steve Paulson: Yeah.
Steve Paulson: But I love your… when I asked about the politics of wonder, imagining what a better
Steve Paulson: world would be.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.
Steve Paulson: Because so often we just think of wonder as, it's like
Steve Paulson: you walk out in a beautiful forest and that's wonderful.
Steve Paulson: But it's imagining a better world.
Steve Paulson: Wow.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.
Carlo Rovelli: To imagine if there was no war and we could all live in peace.
Yeah.
Steve Paulson: So I have one final question
Steve Paulson: that’s
Steve Paulson: related to what we were just talking about.
Steve Paulson: I mentioned that the podcast we're starting is called Wonder Cabinet, and we're just
Steve Paulson: playing around with this imaginary exercise: if there is an imaginary wonder
Steve Paulson: cabinet - you know, a cabinet of wonders, a cabinet of curiosities
Steve Paulson: in the modern age, in the 21st century, we're trying to collect a library of wonders.
Steve Paulson: So if there was an object or a concept or an experience or whatever it might be - one
Steve Paulson: thing that you'd want to put into that cabinet of wonders - anything come to mind?
Carlo Rovelli: I don't know.
Carlo Rovelli: I didn't think about that, but you pushed me to discuss so much about this idea
Carlo Rovelli: that there's no ultimate reality.
Carlo Rovelli: Can I put this notion into your cabinet of wonders?
Steve Paulson: Yeah, absolutely.
Carlo Rovelli: The absence of an ultimate reality, specifically.
Steve Paulson: Okay.
Carlo Rovelli: This idea that we live in a world of relations, which are sort of mirrors, reflecting mirrors.
Wow.
Steve Paulson: Okay.
Steve Paulson: I have to think about that.
Steve Paulson: That's the wonderful thing you would put in the cabinet of wonders, is forgetting, or abolishing,
Steve Paulson: the idea that there is ultimate reality.
Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, and I find it beautiful, liberating, sort of full of light, and powerful, incredibly
Carlo Rovelli: powerful.
Carlo Rovelli: It leaves space open for everything.
Carlo Rovelli: It leaves freedom, in a sense.
Carlo Rovelli: It's okay for your cabinet?
Carlo Rovelli: You want something more concrete?
Steve Paulson: No, no, that is wonderful.
Steve Paulson: I love it.
Carlo Rovelli: Okay.
Steve Paulson: Thank you.
Steve Paulson: This has been such a pleasure.
Carlo Rovelli: Thank you.
Carlo Rovelli: Thank you very much.
Steve Paulson: That's the physicist, Carlo Rovelli, talking with us from the Island of Knowledge think tank
Steve Paulson: near Siena, where scientists and philosophers and writers gather in an old chapel under the
Steve Paulson: olive trees.
Steve Paulson: We'll be back with more interviews from Italy in the coming months.
Anne Strainchamps: Wonder Cabinet is produced in Madison, Wisconsin, at our home studios.
Anne Strainchamps: Our audio engineer is Steve Gotcher.
Anne Strainchamps: Theme music by Joe Hartke.
Anne Strainchamps: And our digital producer is Mark Riechers.
Steve Paulson: Support for the Island of Knowledge and Wonder Cabinet comes from Dartmouth College and the
Steve Paulson: John Templeton Foundation.
Steve Paulson: I'm Steve Paulson.
Anne Strainchamps: And I'm Anne Strainchamps.
Anne Strainchamps: Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for the next episode of Wonder Cabinet.
Anne Strainchamps: I'll be talking with writer and activist Rebecca Solnit about the moral value of hope and wonder
Anne Strainchamps: during difficult times.
Steve Paulson: And meanwhile, we'd love to hear from you.
Steve Paulson: Send your questions and comments, and sign up for our newsletter at wondercabinetproductions.com.
Anne Strainchamps: See you next time.