Given Randall’s own books though, she’s not in a good position to make that argument. This Sunday’s New York Times has a rather hostile review by Lisa Randall of Carlo Rovelli’s popular book Reality is Not What It Seems, which has recently come out in English in the US. We use cookies to give you the best possible experience. Many readers won’t have the background required to distinguish fact from speculation. Carlo Rovelli’s slim poetic meditation Seven Brief Lessons on Physics managed to clarify the troubling uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity, quantum theory and other physical exotica. Throughout, Rovelli repudiates religious fundamentalists of any denomination – but also rejects the idea that science is ever settled. Rovelli’s two slightly different angles on this topic are an interest in the ancient history of speculation about physics and a background in loop quantum gravity rather than HEP theory/string theory. So an understanding of the world requires some grasp of physics. Buy Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Rovelli, Carlo (ISBN: 9785268439021) from Amazon's Book Store. Reality Is Not What It Seems : Carlo Rovelli : 9780141983219 We use cookies to give you the best possible experience. The problem here is, as always (as clearly stated by M.Planck’s famous quote, cited by T.Kuhn), … in the “socio-pathology” of the research environment, where (for reasons of career, funding, narcissism, etc) researchers are politically fighting for the supremacy of certain “fashionable trends” and cannot tolerate the existence of dissonant opinions. showing how the goal posts in supersymmetric dark matter have moved. Or, one could argue that when physicists do this, they should put huge warning labels on what they are doing to make sure no one gets misled. He gives an inspiring account of the intellectual value system of theoretical physics at its best. When will my order arrive? Both of them got a huge amount of attention for this, from the public and from within physics, although these ideas were always highly speculative and unlikely to work out. As should be clear from this blog and book reviews that I’ve written, I agree with Randall about a problem that she leads off the review with: Compounding the author’s challenge is the need to distinguish between speculation, ideas that might be verified in the future, and what is just fanciful thinking. I did read Rovelli’s book and I don’t think it’s supposed to be a solid introduction to loop quantum gravity for the layman. By staying pretty close to how scientists actually work Randall makes it clear that this is a book about the journey, not the final answer. Rovelli responds with a Facebook post. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. It’s all well worth reading, but related to the topic at hand I was struck by the following: Arkani-Hamed considers his tendency to speculate a personal weakness.