Why Theories of Everything Are Ill-Conceived - Facts So Romantic
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The police don’t often sympathize with speeding drivers, but if you’re a quantum gravity physicist who was distracted by a grand epiphany while driving at night, you might have a better chance. “The Italian policeman asked me politely if I was crazy to drive at that speed,” writes the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli in his new book Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity. “I explained that I had just found the idea I’d been seeking for so long.”Rovelli’s epiphany? Figuring out how to write a book on quantum gravity for a popular audience. It was enough for the policeman, who wished a ticketless Rovelli good luck.A professor of physics at Aix-Marseille University in southeast France, Rovelli is one of the pioneers of “loop quantum gravity” theory, which envisions space as (...)