Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Seven short essays, originally written as newspaper columns, and the whole lot comes to about eighty pages with not one equation in it. Rovelli does general relativity as a single beautiful idea, spacetime as a field that bends, then quantum mechanics as the awkward companion that flatly refuses to be reconciled with it. He’s a loop quantum gravity man, so the lesson arguing that space itself is grainy rather than smooth is clearly the one he was itching to write. The last lesson isn’t physics at all, it’s about us, and why we experience time running one way when the equations don’t much care either way. He writes like somebody who finds all of it genuinely lovely rather than clever.

I have to commend the accessibility afforded to such an immensely complex topic. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone who shows the faintest interest in the subject, no matter their level.