YouSaid · the spoken record

Carlo Rovelli

lines on the record: 32
first: 2021-05-28
most recent: 2021-05-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Some generations in the future, humankind will be disappear and everything will be lost. That's it. We live for the present. We don't live for the future. And I mean, we build for the future. I think it's a cheat. We're afraid of death, so we want to be mortal through what we do. I mean, who cares? We are mortal and we should appreciate our mortality, not trying to cheat it into immortality of some other kind.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I don't think good science is overturned. Newton has not been overturned. We have made step ahead. And what has been overturned is the false idea that Newton has got to the bottom of the story. He didn't. But the importance of his work is still monumental, immense, and all the statues of Newton are properly there still first. Second, I don't know work in science is a bit difficult because I don't know whether a lot of the things I've done will be proven, not even less disproven. So who knows what's going to happen in the future. But as far as my concern for posterity, it's much less than what anybody might think. I don't believe in posterity. I mean, so what? I mean,”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just nonsense. And it's more than nonsense. It's bad. So distinguishing the confusion, which is just misusing ideas where we do have some clarity, it's important from the actual confusion that is produced is important. And it shouldn't go neither in one direction or the other. So our being afraid of misuses of idea should not misuse of this uncertainty, this penumbria should not make us afraid of the penumbra itself because that's where creativity and new ideas may come from and that's where we live. We live in uncertainty.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is also a deep truth. Now, I think this is extraordinarily useful way of thinking about ourselves and about the scientific enterprise. And also that there is a subtle line, a delicate line, but important line in separating this with the bad use that the penumbra that Philip was mentioning can be is sometimes being used. And quantum physics has been subject to so much misuse. I mean, there are people selling medicines calling quantum medicine. There are, you know, associations using quantum this and quantum that pretending that since everything is connected, this also can be true. What you know, it might be true. And it's just Charloteneria, we say in Italian, it's just bullshit we see in America. I don't know how you see it in the UK.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I share Philip's views about these things, and I'm not the only one. One of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, in fact, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics is Niels Bohr, who has been one of the deep thinkers. And one of the things he loved to repeat is the following sentence, that a deep truth A truth such that the opposite truth, it's also true.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think that I can be a scientist, a hard scientist all the way through and have nothing in contradiction with all that.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I am a hardcore materialist, naturalist, atheist, scientist. The worst thing you can put together, I see no contradiction whatsoever between that and me going kissing a tree before a talk and all these magics. And the word magic is... Because what does this evocate? It evocates a sense of wonder and lightness and incomprehensibility, which is not something science avoids. Something that science is motivated by. Science is very good in unmasking the magic which is false magic, right? It's very good of saying, look, that's impossible. It's truly impossible. It's wrong. But there are so many things, especially all things related to the way we ourselves work and think, which is there anything scientific proving that is not true that going out in a tree calm would put me in the right no, of course.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. When I do sciences, it's a notebook and a pen, of course. I'm usually lying on a sofa and writing and calculating. And once in a while looking in some papers or something. But writing for me has been since the very beginning computer writing because I write a paragraph, I change it, I rewrite it, I change every word 12 times, I go back. It's completely in this constant evolution in a way that I would not be able to do it. I'm a very slow writer, in fact. I keep going back and rewriting. And of course, I have all sorts of magic and rituals. I'm totally incapable of giving a talk. Public talk online or for real, if before that, I don't walk out, find a tree, go near a tree, touch the tree, look at it and get inspired by it. And then it relaxes me, give me power, strength. I go back, I'm smiling, I'm happy, and I can do it.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not capable of doing right. I cannot tell a story in which I've seen in two persons in a room talking to one another and say what happened in a convincing way. I cannot make it up because the only thing I can do is do the opposite. Start from an idea and look for the words to try to express it. So in one sense, I'm not a writer at all. I would never be able to write a novel. I think we're doing something similar in describing realities, describing worlds, but also something very different in the actual process. And I have a question. Do you really write with a pen?”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We all struggle to give an identity to ourselves. And I have done the same mistake and I keep thinking, oh, but I'm a scientist. I'm not something else. So I try to think of myself as a scientist. In fact, I'm not writing now. I'm doing calculations about black holes. But we have many things at the same time. Each of us is all sort of different things at the same time. And we change. We're not one thing. Every day in our life, redesign us and make us something different. So obviously, writing books and what comes around has added things to me. We're all layers of identities. I'm not a writer in a specific sense. I was listening very carefully, Philip. That's exactly what”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, but that's my question because once again, doing science is not about finding the right questions, finding the right answers, is to find the right questions. Sometimes I think what should I ask if I met God or I met somebody in the next 10 millennia who know many things? That's not the point. I mean, I should ask him, what should I ask? Okay, what could I tell a scientist of the past useful for him? I mean, not one of the questions, not one of the answers of the question that he was posing. Stop posing that question. The interesting question is another one.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you know, do creative work, you need such a combination of skills. And of course, some natural when young, but some come with the amount of knowledge you have. So I guess that growing older, on the one hand, we lose courage. On the other hand, we gain perspective. We have seen so many wrong things that we can avoid wrong things. And sometimes we get a wider view of things. That's no doubt. But that's good because the world is made by young and old people so they can collaborate.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a fact that most great scientific results were obtained by young people. Not all of them. So, you know, people, old people like me can still hope a little bit to do something useful. But it's when you're young, you have a greater scientific creativity. There's no doubt about that. You need to be able to think different, to have courage, to revolt, to go against what you know. You need the flexibility you have when you're young.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What science is realizing that what seems obvious to us might be wrong. And therefore, that there might be a different perspective of things. Then scientists have all its methods, you know, measuring equations and all that. But these are tools. The point is understanding something new, to understand something new very often. The barrage is not the difficulty in itself. It's what we think we know, right? So we know that the earth is flat. So why should we question it? Well, because it's wrong. And so realizing that there is this space of uncertainty surrounding us everywhere, near us, inside us, it's a first step towards science, in my opinion.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, we're all a little in love with Lyra. So we look forward to seeing it. It's hard not to be. I very much recognize what you're saying. I think that is what is fascinating in your books. This penumbra, one might say wrongly that it seems to be something that goes against enlightening clear light scientific picture of the world. I think that the reality is exactly the opposite. What a scientific picture of the world is to recognize that we see certain things and there are so many things that we don't see yet we are confused about, we are vague because they are complicated, because they are complex, because they regard things happening inside ourselves that we don't know, because they regard aspect of the world we haven't understood.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to dissolve the problem. We're going to understand better the mind and realize that it seems so hard to us because we try to frame it in the wrong language. And the quantum evolution, I think help us in that. And really, in the Galjuna, help us in that. Because Nagarjuna is all about relations. Things don't exist by themselves, but they exist in relation to something else, depending on something else.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terms of just individual object with properties. But the world is only comprehensible in how things relate to one another. This should be a general thing. So you talked about consciousness. The problem of consciousness is that we think about me as an entity and you say, well, come on, how I can be made by little atoms bouncing around. There cannot be. But the point is that the atoms are not atoms. They are relation between things. And I am not an entity. I'm a relation between things. When you start to reframing the things this way, it's, you know, like when Philip is saying pie, you can do all this very long calculation that never ends, but you can also draw a circle, a line. And that's pi. So if you change the way the problem is formulated, and if you view it from a different perspective, things that seem to be problems for us disappears. And I think that consciousness is a typical thing that we're not going to solve.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The life of anybody change? Well, now people walk up in the morning and brass shed teeth the same as before. Or when Darwin find out, Darwin is another one who went alone, was sort of alone, but went away in the wilderness with the beagle, with a boat around the world to find an incredible discovery that casing with all the other animals and plants. When that became clear, and it's clear, did our life change? didn't. You know, we do the same thing as before. But boy, we think about ourselves differently. We do things about ourselves differently, right? Change is completely the meaning of what we are, just thinking that me and the tree have a common ancestor, which is cousins. And the same, I think, is true for quantum mechanics. If we think that to understand the world science itself shouldn't work in”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're certainly living it with its applications, right? If we can talk to one another through a computer right now, it's because chips and integrated circuits have been built using quantum theory. So we're using it heavily in everyday life. But that's not what you're asking. You're asking whether the insights of quantum mechanics actually touch us. I think that The answer is they should. And maybe they haven't yet enough. Look, when Copernicus found out that Earth is not the center of the universe,”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is still strange and mysterious. That's the beauty of it, right? The book, my book is not, look, we have learned that the world works this way. I tell you how it is. My book is, look, we have learned something astonishing quantum theory. We are still struggling to find some light in the darkness of what exactly it means. And this is where we are.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Credible complication of a black hole with all its magic, right? So I do think that there's a general influence. But then there's also a very much stricter influence by philosophy in particular. I mentioned Heisenberg learning from Mach, a philosopher. In fact, it's technical article starts with almost a quotation, a citation from Mach. But my book has a chapter of Nagaljuna, a Buddhist philosopher of the second century, and has a chapter about Lenin and Bogdan, of which the heads of the Bolshevik Party sort of at the time of the October Revolution in Russia, not by love of talk about strange things in a science book, but because I do believe that ideas which are produced by these people do help us making sense of the strange, mysterious things which is quantum theory.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, not directly, but indirectly certainly, yes, because literature is an incredible way of exercising your mind to think about alternatives to what you see around yourself, right? And that's exactly what you need to do when you do science. We grew up with a simple story of what reality is. Well, reality is simple, right? There's a chair there, there's a table there, and that's it. Sky is there, there's down. And then you discover that this is just your little room. The universe is immense. And that's exactly the same profound feeling that you have when you read a story or a novel or for science fiction or fantasy. I mean, there are many possibilities in the world. And our universe, in fact, nature has more imagination than us in spite of everything, that all of us. I mean, which science writer could have really come out with, I think...”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yah, the actual reason or excuse to go there was that Heisenberg suffered as a strong allergy. And one of the advantages of an island without vegetation in the middle of sea, of course, is no pollen, so you don't suffer from allergy. But it was a tradition, it was believed to be the hiding place of a pirate, Helgoland, Storbrook, something like that, which Little Heisenberg loved when a kid. I mean, German and Northern kids have the stories of pirates typical there. So I can't imagine not this being one of the reasons for him to go to this sort of mysterious pirate place in the middle of the sea to concentrate, to focus on his big mysteries on which he was working.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something more than just their immediate meanings. I think that that's what our culture is. It's a continuous crisscrossing of ideas and meanings that are reused in different situations. And science uses all the cultural water in which it swims to do what science do, which is also explaining us and giving us tools for doing for real. There's a mixture of being extremely concrete and extremely flexible and vague. But what works in all that is the connection, is the relations.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Pauli and Heisenberg had spent a lot of time discussing Mac philosophy. These were young kids which are immersed in science but had a very large culture, philosophical, artistic, literately. And all these comes into this revolution. It's the same thing. I'm deeply convinced in it. Science is not just about numbers and writing equations. It's about having, especially in these deep moments of rethinking the reality, it's about the capacity of creating new worlds, of imagining new worlds. Of course, then measurements, equations, and so on and so forth. This is why, I mean, when I read the worlds that Philip creates and put up together, of course these are worlds of fantasy on the one hand. And, you know, it's just a fantasy. But at the same time, they're talking. They're talking to us exactly like the white of the sun is telling us.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you, Philip. It's very kind. Let me put it in this way. When Heisenberg was on the island, He was a young physicist, right? Immersed into physics. He had been in Copenhagen working with Bohr to get up to date with everything known at the time about the atoms, all the mysteries of the atoms, how the physics, the mechanic of the atoms work, which was puzzling the physicists of his generation. But he went there not just with that. First of all, he had poetry with him. He had Goethe and was in fact spending his time doing calculation and in any spare moment learning by heart Goethe poems of the Western Eastern Divan. It's about Islam and Goethe love for Islam. And he had in his mind a lot of philosophy, a good friend of Heisenberg was Pauli, whose father was friend of”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So things don't exist by themselves. Nothing exists by itself. It's a relation of between things that builds up the world. If we think about reality of individual things with properties, I don't know, particles with properties, object with properties, you just don't get it. We have to think that an object has a property only in interacting with something else. I think this is the core of at least this way of viewing quantum theory. And you see how deep is, how just profound is. It's just that Dawn thinks about things. The world is not day by things.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's not easy. It takes a full book to try to explain it. Because quantum mechanics, I mean, it's a basics of modern physics, right? And it's used for computers, for lasers, for all sorts of things, for atomic physics, of course, for understanding the basis of chemistry of the galaxy. So it's a core of modern physics. It's actually how the wave, it replaces basic Newtonian mechanics, which turn out not to be right. And it tells us that if you go into the equations, it tells us that, yeah, it's not easy. That's a point. No, there's still a huge discussion among physicists and philosophers what exactly it means. And I think my take on it, and the entire book goes around this idea, what is really telling us is that objects have only properties when they interact with other objects.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The constituent of reality, in fact, what reality itself is, is different after what he has found out, which has worked fantastically. I mean, all our technology is based on quantum mechanics. So that's why Helga is a point of, I would say, of the great”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Einstein. And every time it's like a complete change of what the world is, in fact, we just keep changing our view of the world. And perhaps the latest or the greatest even of these huge revolutions, quantum mechanics, quantum theory. And quantum theory has started in a place by a single person because, you know, many people collaborate to create the possibility of something. But there is usually one person that snaps. And quantum physics started on the island of Helgoland. That's the title of the book. The title of the book is The Name of the Island, where quantum revolution started. And there was one guy, in fact, a young kid It was twenty three Werner Heisenberg in solitude who had the key idea that changed completely the way we think about the world today with respect to what was before. The notion of what matter is.”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me start from this. What has attracted me in science? And actually, what I do still now find fascinating in science is perhaps be called with expression that you used before in the introduction, which is world making. What is great in science for me is not the understanding of this particular mechanism of this detail. It's this absolutely astonishing capacity that has had science repeatedly in the centuries of changing completely our worldview, our vision of the world. And this has happened many times, has happened in antiquity when people realize that the earth is not just something with a sky on top, but is a little stone that floats in the middle of the sky. It has happened with the Copernican evolution. It has happened with Darwin. It has happened with...”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've no recollection of how we came out to meet, but I remember that we tried a few times and it was finally when we succeeded in Oxford. And what I remember is a pub, a beer, a lot of talking about literature writing and creating world and science creativity. And we meeting in front of a very strange architectural place where I happened to have given a lecture or something. And then a strong desire of meeting again, but then this was long ago before the last dramatic revolution earth before we all started to living in this virtual world. So it seems so long ago. Do you have better memories?”
2021-05-28 · Intelligence Squared · Carlo Rovelli and Philip Pullman on the Science and Stories That Transform Our World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source