Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity

Much of our knowledge revolves around ourselves, as if we were the most important thing in the universe. I think I like physics because it opens a window through which we can see further. It gives me the sense of fresh air entering the house.

Scientific thinking explores and redraws the world, gradually offering us better and better images of it, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more eff... See more

The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don’t know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.

Quantum fields draw together space, time, matter, and light, exchanging information between one event and another. Reality is a network of granular events; the dynamic that connects them is probabilistic; between one event and another, space, time, matter, and energy melt into a cloud of probability.

We are all in the depths of a cave, chained by our ignorance, by our prejudices, and our weak senses reveal to us only shadows.

Perhaps the decisive discovery is that of a different style of thinking, where the disciple is no longer obliged to respect and share the ideas of the master but is free to build on those ideas without being afraid to discard or criticize the part that can be improved.

This is not a book about certainties; it is a book about the adventure of moving toward the unknown.