#rovelli

The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming. We can think of the world as made up of things. Of substances. Of entities. Of something that is. Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings. Of processes. Of something that occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time. The destruction of the notion of time in fundamental physics is the crumbling of the first of these two perspectives, not of the second. It is the realization of the ubiquity of impermanence, not of stasis in a motionless time. Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend, and describe it. It is the only way that is compatible with relativity. The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones. The basic units in terms of which we comprehend the world are not located in some specific point in space. They are—if they are at all—in a where but also in a when. They are spatially but also temporally delimited: they are events.

Audio e libro

Il testo di Marco Rovelli dedicato a Claudio Lolli l’ho centellinato. Deliberatamente. Volevo berlo a piccoli sorsi per gustarlo meglio e perché mi accompagnasse per tutta l’estate, come un passito da trincare, giorno per giorno, dopo l’assunzione di altre letture.

I own a copy of reality is not what it seems but I haven’t got around to reading it yet! what did you think of it, if you don’t mind me asking?

Tutta l'evoluzione della scienza indica che la migliore grammatica per pensare il mondo sia quella del cambiamento, non quella della permanenza. Dell'accadere, non dell'essere. […] Pensare il mondo come un insieme di eventi, di processi, è il modo che ci permette di meglio coglierlo, comprenderlo, descriverlo. […] La differenza fra cose e eventi è che le cose permangono nel tempo. Gli eventi hanno durata limitata. Un prototipo di «cosa» è un sasso: possiamo chiederci dove sarà domani. Mentre un bacio è un «evento». Non ha senso chiedersi dove si andato il bacio domani. 

According to Whitehead, “The physical world is in some general sense of the term a deduced concept. Our problem is, in fact, to fit the world to our perceptions, and not our perceptions to the world.” This statement may seem a bit strange coming from a professed realist. But we must not misunderstand Whitehead’s meaning. He is, as Auxier and Herstein make clear, a radical empiricist in William James’ sense. The universe is relational and esemplastic: it grows from the inside out, each part containing the whole in potentia. Whatever this universe is, it is happing not just “out there” but right here, right now within and between us. We do not and cannot experience the universe in its integrity as a child observes a snow globe at arms length. But the “Big Bang” model of inflationary cosmology is often discussed at least in popular science books and by science journalists precisely in this way, as though we were turning the world around in our hand to have a good look at it. Where are we as observers in these acts of cosmological imagination? Precisely nowhere.