Reality Is Not What It Seems

Really interesting read, but probably punching a bit above my weight. Especially by the time Rovelli outlines the concept of spin foam and all possible realities being concurrent. Pretty mind boggling stuff.

Exceptional and mind blowing

The problem with the quantum theory is that everyone has an opinion on it. And, unfortunately, most people's opinions are based on the woefully outdated physics textbooks. Finding a book summarizing the latest scientific breakthroughs in the field is a pleasant surprise and a welcome distraction from the dreaded reality where alt-Nazis and radical Christians join their forces in an all-out assault on the ideals of Enlightenment. Carlo Rovelli is a great scientific writer. He manages to explain clearly complex ideas and illustrates scientific discoveries with clever thought experiments. But what makes this book eminently readable is Rovelli's knack for weaving wildly different theories - Democritus atomism, Faraday and Maxwell's discovery of electromagnetism, Einstein theories of relativity, Shannon's information theory to name just a few - into an elegant narrative about the ongoing inquiry into the nature of reality. This narrative is full of poetic metaphors and intellectual paradoxes, especially as Carlo Rovelli grapples with modern day quantum theory. Suddenly, you discover that time does not exist (at least, not on the micro-scale); that our world is finite but limitless; and that while we can discover fundamental concepts governing our universe, our knowledge of this universe is relational and, therefore, probabilistic. There is some good news too. Apparently, the universe can be explained as a complex construct consisting of space quanta, and some of the crazier predictions put forward by the quantum theory (Higgs boson, gravitational waves) have been confirmed by scientific experiments. To be fair, not all aspects of the quantum theory receive the same treatment in the book. The discussion of space quanta and loop theory left me feeling woozy and I wish Carlo Rovelli spent more time discussing the nature of black holes or how scientists understand time. But on the whole, however, the book does an excellent job of introducing the subject and sending you on a quest to find out more about the aspects of the theory that pique your interest (an annotated bibliography at the end). In short, thumbs up!