The universe, writ small

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. By Carlo Rovelli. Translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. Allen Lane; 83 pages; £9.99.

ACADEMICS are not known for brevity in writing. And physics does not lend itself to pithy introductions. What a surprise, then, that “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” by Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist, has been such a success. It began life in an Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, as a series of breezy introductions to some of the densest corners of physics. Now the diminutive volume has become a bestseller in its native Italy.

It is a startling and illustrative distillation of centuries of science. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre, a poet-and-translator pair, have preserved the book’s lyrical and stripped-down prose. Early chapters that describe more settled science are intense and flavourful reductions. Mr Rovelli moves elegantly between illustrative metaphors, without ever mixing or belabouring any of them. Outlining contemporary debates, he is a bit more expansive. The closing chapter, the longest, reflects on what it all means for the reader. Outward-looking cosmic questions turn inward, to the philosophy of science, to free will, to the meaning of self. Armed with a view of themselves in a seething milieu of particles careening around a stretchy space-time, readers are reminded they are “an integral part of the world which we perceive”—not at all central, but integral.

Just occasionally, the author fails to distinguish between those areas on which there is consensus and those on which he has particular ideas. Thus, in a chapter on the effort to unify general relativity (Albert Einstein’s masterwork that describes gravity) with quantum mechanics (which describes just about everything else in the universe), Mr Rovelli outlines only the theory he himself helped to found, without much mention of rival explanations.

No matter: as Mr Rovelli himself has said, ideas are cheap. The book’s triumph lies not only in presenting some of the headiest stuff science has produced in so few pages, but also in giving real insight into how science treats those ideas. It conveys fully both the frustration and the promise of those questions not yet answered. Mr Rovelli recounts several brilliant insights rejected in their youth and later celebrated. He also describes frontiers of science that are “incandescent in the forge of nascent ideas” and hints at experiments that will resolve the mysteries that remain. In the book’s closing line he—rightly—deems this landscape breathtaking.