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Book review - "Seven Brief Lessons On Physics" by Carlo Rovelli
December 5, 2024
I missed the free Friday night concert which was part of the
Oberon Chamber Music Festival because I was giving a short talk to a
roomful of amazing young people at the Science Teachers Association
of NSW's
Young Scientist Awards. Being surrounded by school students who
were a lot smarter than me got me thinking about how science should
be taught. This book is a good example of how to go about it.
PB
I have to admit that Physics was never my favourite subject back
in my studying days. All those equations, all that weirdness (and
not just confined to "quantum weirdness"), blackboards covered with
hieroglyphics, the need, like the White Queen, to believe "as many
as six impossible things before breakfast" or continuing the Alice
allusions and quoting the Cheshire Cat "I'm not strange, weird, off,
nor crazy, my reality is just different to yours".
It was a great pleasure, therefore, to find this small book (83 pages including index) which provided exactly what the title suggests - some physics lessons that can even be understood by "a bear of very little brain". (I know, I know, but I get so few opportunities to flaunt my liberal Arts education when discussing matters of science.)
The seven lessons are:
- Relativity
- Quantum mechanics
- The structure of the universe
- Particles and quarks (here is where we Arts graduates say "Three quarks for Muster Mark")
- Quantum gravity - the granularity of space
- Probability and the movement of heat
- How do we fit into all this?
You can easily read this book in an afternoon, and it would be an afternoon well spent. It is well written (and survived translation – this edition is in English, but the original Italian has been translated into thirty-one languages) and the lessons are clear and easily understood by someone with no special training in physics (or the mathematics which usually makes laypeople run away from physics texts). I just wish some of my teachers over the years had been able to explain things so well.
Oberon Library can probably get you a copy of this book through an interlibrary loan.
About the author:
Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time and is a founder of loop quantum gravity theory. He has worked in Italy and the US and at the time the book was written he was directing the quantum gravity research group at the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseilles, France. He is someone who knows what he is talking about.
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