Transcript

Anne Strainchamps: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.

Anne Strainchamps: I'm Anne Strainchamps.

Steve Paulson: And I'm Steve Paulson.

Anne Strainchamps: Where do you go when you need a dose of wonder?

Steve Paulson: A way to lift your spirits, let go of the day's heaviness.

Anne Strainchamps: Well, the biggest frame of reference we have is the cosmos, an entire universe of expanded horizons and limitless possibility.

Steve Paulson: Where time flows differently, space bends and curves, and reality is so much more than what our senses tell us.

Anne Strainchamps: Imagine you're a theoretical physicist. You spend your whole life on the edge of all that wonder. Every day you wake up and you do your best to understand it just a little bit better. Maybe even discover something new.

Anne Strainchamps: What was it like for you to see that first photograph of the black hole? Do you remember?

Carlo Rovelli: Yes, it was an incredible emotion. It's like, you know, we've been studying an animal, mysterious all your life, and then you see it. Well, it exists, it's real.

Steve Paulson: This is Carlo Rovelli, and he is one of the world's most celebrated physicists. Author of a string of best-selling books, including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality is Not What It Seems, and The Order of Time.

Anne Strainchamps: We thought we would start this hour by playing this little story that he told me a few years ago about one of his own favorite moments of wonder.

Carlo Rovelli: The best experience has not been the picture of the black hole, which is a few years ago, but a little bit before that, there was the announcement of the detection of the gravitational waves that was produced by a black hole. Since there are so many black holes in the sky, they can meet and fall into one another. They fall into one another, they start orbiting, turning around, then orbiting faster and faster, getting closer and closer, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, closer, closer, closer, then whoop! They just eat each other, so to say. And if they do so, they produce this enormously strong oscillation of space, which is what was detected.

Carlo Rovelli: The announcement of that was given publicly, and the press conference was during a class I was giving to my students in Marseille on general relativity. So I told the students, look, there is this press conference, they say they have gravitational waves, they have not seen what they have seen, they say they have seen. And I turned the computer on in front of the class. But before, I gave them the theory. I explained to them that the black hole can merge, and they produce this wave, and oscillations, which first is slow and weak, and then become faster and higher. So if it was a sound, it would be something like, whoop! It's a chirp, the chirp of the black hole. Whip! And I drew the shape of this wave of the black hole.

Carlo Rovelli: Then we turned the computer on to the press conference.

Narrator: The black holes are getting closer and closer to one another. There is great emotion. They're going to merge. Boom. The first time that this has ever been seen. As I said, we can hear gravitational waves. We can hear the universe. And this is a signal that we have measured. There's the rumbling noise, and then there's the chirp.

Carlo Rovelli: The shape of the wave appears, and is exactly equal to the shape of the chirp of the black hole. Whoop! That's the chirp we've been looking for. And the students, it was a class of 20, 30 students, all together, wow! What? There's like science at its best, when you're really, when you're really science, it's shining.

Narrator: Gravitational waves. We did it.

Steve Paulson: That is an episode we did on To the Best of Our Knowledge a while back, and today we are excited to bring you a brand new conversation with Carlo Rovelli.

Anne Strainchamps: Recorded at the Island of Knowledge in Italy,

Steve Paulson: Which, to be clear, is not an actual island. It's a small think tank in Tuscany where three times a year, small groups of scientists and philosophers come together to explore some really big questions. And this time, Rovelli was there.

Carlo Rovelli: What do you want to talk about? What's the topic?

Steve Paulson: You.

Carlo Rovelli: Oh boy. Okay.

Steve Paulson: So I want to take you back to your early years as a scientist. Why did you want to become a physicist?

Carlo Rovelli: That was not an early call. My actual plan after high school was to go traveling the world. My ambition was to become a beggar.

Steve Paulson: Really?

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.

Steve Paulson: Travel around the world, I don't know.

Carlo Rovelli: As a beggar.

Steve Paulson: The modern St. Francis, holding out your hat.

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, exactly. You got it right. It was not a lack of esteem in myself. It was an overestimation. The models were St. Francis or Buddha, right? So it was an overambition.

Steve Paulson: So I have read that one of your formative experiences, probably more than one, is psychedelics. When you were a teenager, LSD in particular?

Carlo Rovelli: Well, psychedelics is even before that.

Steve Paulson: Okay.

Carlo Rovelli: In fact, I was a teenager. I was 16.

Steve Paulson: Ah.

Carlo Rovelli: I got into that because the little I read about it sounded completely fascinating, the idea of exploring state of consciousness, seeing the world differently, going with the mind, who knows where. These were the early 70s. I grew up in Verona. It was a sort of provincial small town in Italy. But I was visiting Paris. And then a friend of a friend, you know, said, oh, maybe I can get some LSD. There is somebody, people called Los Pagnole, the Spanish. I'll ask for him. So he sold us these little pieces of paper and we have no idea whether he's just cheating us.

Steve Paulson: Oh, these were like the acid blotters.

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, exactly. That was a first. And it was a spectacular experience. It was extremely powerful, which left a big impact on me.

Steve Paulson: Why did it make such an impact on you?

Carlo Rovelli: It upset my sense of what I knew about reality entirely. I was very young. I mean, this was before my first girlfriend.

Steve Paulson: Yeah. I mean, 16.That's young to start taking psychedelics, LSD in particular.

Carlo Rovelli: It is young, yes. I had the good fortune of a friend that gave me the simplest, best instruction about it. He said, look, whatever happens, don't worry, don't panic, don't resist, let it go. You're going to come back. So, I mean, there was a first phase in which just dancing colors and, you know, the houses becoming fat and beautiful. All this.

Steve Paulson: Right. What were solid lines became wavy.

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, everything wavy and all this theater. And we were, the three of us, super happy. And then, but that was only the beginning. Then at some point, I felt this wave arriving on me and I just sat down under a tree. We were in a park in the night and put my hands in front of my eyes and just felt that I was going totally elsewhere. I remember the first images were this huge red color that was opening and me going in and then closing behind me, and then this blue screen and opening and me going. And I said, oh boy, what's going on here? There was nothing of what was familiar around. No space, no time, no myself. With incredible beauty, incredible emotion, incredible intensity.

Steve Paulson: Was it a single experience or did you have a few more like that?

Carlo Rovelli: No, I repeated it. I'm talking about the first one because it was really the one which opened up a world for me. I repeated it not many times, maybe in my life less than 10 times during my youth. Then I stopped. What did I take away from that? You know, I do quantum gravity. I do fundamental physics. What is space? What is time?

Steve Paulson: This seems like good training.

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, exactly.

Steve Paulson: To become a theoretical physicist, to question the nature of reality.

Carlo Rovelli: In a sense, yes. I think there was a liberating, intellectually liberating thing. The sense that reality can be profoundly different from our everyday view of reality, probably rooted in that, I've always felt is like our sleepwalking without seeing what's behind it.

Steve Paulson: I mean, you're talking about experiences you had 50 years ago.

Carlo Rovelli: I'm talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve Paulson: And you're saying you still think about those.

Carlo Rovelli: I still think about that. Yeah.

Steve Paulson: So you went on, of course, to become a major theoretical physicist.

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, much later. I went to physics 10 years later.

Steve Paulson: But it sounds like those experiences maybe helped push you in the direction of wanting to become a physicist.

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, maybe. I was, yeah, sure. I was rebellious as a kid. I grew up in a loving family and in a provincial Italy, a bit fascist. I was covered by love by my mother. You know, love is the greatest thing around, but sometimes it's heavy. I needed to run away.

The same summer in Paris, I met a friend from Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria, which at the time was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. It was the Soviet world. We went into enormous political discussions and he kept saying, yeah, you should come and see. And so I decided to go. So at 16, alone, I hitchhiked through Europe from Paris to Sofia, a thousand kilometers, sleeping in the fields. I crossed into the Soviet world. And that was another liberating, mind liberating experience for me. I realized that the Soviet world was nothing like we were told by the Western propaganda. But the shocking thing was that the Soviet propaganda was describing a Western world, which is nothing like my experience. So I realized that Europe was living at the time split in two parts. Each one was telling a story about the other, which is completely fake. And since then, I became very sensitive to propaganda somehow. I listen to the news. And even today, I spend my time listening to news from all over the world. I regularly make the tour. I listen to the Chinese, to the Indians, to the Brazilian, to the Iranians, to the South Africans, to the Americans, the British, the Italian. And it's so obvious that everybody's telling stories.

Steve Paulson: Well, and it's just, I mean, going back to those early years, too. You said you started getting really interested in politics. I mean, I know you became a student radical. I mean, literally, manning the barricades.

Carlo Rovelli: I was a student radical. There was a rebellion movement in Italy in the late 70s, which was a long way from the sort of the 60s. So, yes, I was involved in this radical politics. I was fascinated by radical movements. I mean, from Che Guevara to Mao Zedong, I was that generation.

Steve Paulson: And you were arrested at one point, right, for refusing military service?

Carlo Rovelli: I was arrested for refusing military service because I was strongly pacifist in that sense. I don't believe in borders, even today. I don't believe in patria. They say I'm not patriotic.

Steve Paulson: Patriotism.

Carlo Rovelli: I don't believe in patriotism. I believe in the fact that we are a single tribe all over the planet.

Steve Paulson: So, I want to come back to this. I want to come back to politics. But I want to spend a little bit of time talking about your work as a physicist.

Carlo Rovelli: Well, that was somehow the moment of political engagement ended up with quite a disappointment. To put it brutally, we wanted to change the world, make a revolution for a more gentle world without weapons, without borders. And we failed. We lost the revolution. So, I had to find something else to do. And at that precise moment, I fell in love with physics. It was madly falling in love with physics.

Steve Paulson: Why did you fall in love with physics?

Carlo Rovelli: Because quantum mechanics and general relativity are the most beautiful human creations. First, Einstein theory. General relativity is incredibly spectacular. It's better than LSD. I mean, it's telling that reality is profoundly different than what we instinctively think. But in a way, that works so well. I mean, there's this curving of space, stretching on time. And yet, this works fantastically to describe things which are really in the universe. Gravitation waves, black holes, suspenseful universe.

Steve Paulson: So, it was the sense that you were getting closer to what the nature of reality was? Was that the fascination? Or was it sort of at a mathematical level?

Carlo Rovelli: No, it was not mathematics. I would have never been fascinated by mathematics. I'm bored by mathematics. I'm not a good mathematician. I have to struggle through mathematics.

Steve Paulson: But it's sort of, my sense is, it's sort of like, I mean, the great thing about theoretical physics is, I mean, you're sort of cracking the code in a sense of, you know, how all of this, you know, is structured, came into being in a way, right?

Carlo Rovelli: Yes and no. I would say it's a strong feeling of raising a veil and seeing something that you couldn't see before. Understanding profoundly better reality. But that doesn't mean cracking the code. And I never thought, and I still don't think, that science is getting at the bottom of things. It's getting one more layer. But maybe there's another layer. There's another layer again. I don't like the idea that we are getting to the bottom.

Steve Paulson: Well, I'm surprised that you say that because, I mean, your work on quantum gravity, I mean, one of the things that you're famous for is this effort to reconcile these two reigning models of physics, of general relativity and quantum mechanics, which, you know, no one has figured out how to sort of bring those two together.

Carlo Rovelli: Exactly. And I think that there is a way of putting the two together. That's what basically I spent my life on. I've been paid all my life for trying. And with friends and colleagues, we have a tentative way of bringing together quantum mechanics and Einstein theories. General relativity, I hope it works. I hope it's good. And I think it is understanding something more about the world, something deeper about the world. But look, if you have a girlfriend, you understand her better. Do you really think you know everything about her?

Steve Paulson: No, of course not.

Carlo Rovelli: And so it's with reality. It's like with the girlfriend. And it's wonderful when you open your eyes, when you communicate with a person. And it's equally wonderful when you communicate with nature. You see something about nature you didn't see before. So, general relativity is this kind of discovery. Wow, we realize that this idea of a rigid space in which we are in a common time, this is all approximation. It's not the reality, right? It's far more complicated than that. So, you see beyond it, and you see more. But I don't have the ambition that I've got looking to,, talking to God and getting to the bottom.

Steve Paulson: I mean, no, you know, not finding ultimate reality, but maybe getting a little closer to what is real.

Carlo Rovelli: A little better understanding of this abyssal thing. We don't know the fundamental law of quantum gravity yet. We don't have a unified theory. So, there's so many things we don't know. We live in an open, marvelous, beautiful, mysterious, sacred universe of which we understand a lot. And we are happy to understand a lot. It is an incredibly beautiful feeling to understand more. And I want to contribute to understand more.

Steve Paulson: So, we're at a scientific conference right now in Italy, 30 miles south of Siena.

Carlo Rovelli: Beautiful countryside.

Steve Paulson: Beautiful countryside. We're part of this Island of Knowledge think tank. And the point of this particular meeting that we're at is asking some really big questions. One is, is there ultimate reality? I mean, that is one of the questions that's been put on the table here. And I have to say, you had a fascinating answer to that. I mean, you said when you were young, this was an agonizing question for you. But no longer. You say it's a bad question and we should not ask that question. So, before we get to why you say this is a bad question, I want to take you back to when you were young and when you agonized over that question.

Steve Paulson: Okay. While Carlo thinks about this, we're going to take a short break.

MUSIC

Anne Strainchamps: Hi, it's Anne. I am so glad you're joining us. We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead. I'm really excited about them. And here's a tip. Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts, those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed. I hope you like it.

Steve Paulson: I'm Steve Paulson, and we are back with theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, who has been thinking about why he was consumed by questions about ultimate reality when he was young.

Carlo Rovelli: Yes, I had a difficult adolescence. I disliked the adults around me. I couldn't understand why they were doing what they were doing. Everybody had great, beautiful ideals to talk about, and they seemed to me all to be fake and incredibly hypocritical. So I was very confused about the world, about everything. And this confusion grew, in a sense. And the desire to put order and understanding was very strong. And I remember that I had this strong sense, there should be a truth somewhere. I want to go for the truth. This has been a... If I read back, I have been writing all my life a lot, just for myself, notebook and notebook. And this idea, I want to try to go for the truth, it's all over my writing. I don't want to fake it. I don't want to become hypocritical. And I want to search. That was also the spirit of the time. We were all searching. This is all in search.

Steve Paulson: But I'm sure you're searching now, but it sounds like it's a very different way now. So I'm trying to figure out. What was the nature of that search?

Carlo Rovelli: I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I'm still searching, right? I'm paid for searching. I was so lucky that I then got a job to search. But I'm not searching for the ultimate reality. I'm searching for understanding of something more. And I think the idea of the ultimate reality in science, like in philosophy, it's a bad idea.

Nowadays, I'm more and more interested in philosophy. I go to philosophy conferences. This is very philosophical, this meeting. I'm invited by philosophy departments. I write in philosophy journals. And I read a huge amount of philosophy. And the idea of getting to the bottom, understanding the ultimate nature of reality, what is nature, what is fundamental? It's matter, spirit, it's God, it's perception, it's consciousness, it's language. None of this is fundamental. It's like when we're talking about music before, right? I'm not a musician. Suppose I was a musician. I want to write better and better music. Do I want to write the ultimate music? No, there's no ultimate music. But there is better music. And I think there is better knowledge.

Einstein is better than Newton. Newton is very good. He’s super, super good and still used a lot. Einstein is better. It's a deeper look into reality. And if all goes right, quantum gravity is a little step ahead. Can't we be happy with the lack of knowledge?

Steve Paulson: Was that something that came, this appreciation of not knowing?

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.

Steve Paulson: Did that come with age?

Carlo Rovelli: With age, maybe it's just, you know, you get relaxed with age.

Steve Paulson: I'm asking this out of genuine curiosity because I'll tell you a little bit about my own personal history. So when I was 17, 18, 19, I was obsessed with the existential writers, you know, those kind of depressing European writers. Camus, Dostoevsky, Kafka, you know, all those guys. Like The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus is sort of this foundational book for me. And that quest for meaning was hugely important. I agonized over that. And I don't anymore. And I've puzzled over that. I mean, you know, maybe I'm wiser now. There’s a lot of lived experience. Since then, you know, I can sort of rationalize this. Or maybe I'm just a little jaded and life isn't as raw as it once was. I'm kind of a little more comfortable. And I don't maybe feel like I need to ask those big questions anymore. So I'm interested in your response partly because you're interested in time, and age and time go together. And I'm just wondering, yeah, we're wiser, I guess, as we're older. But do we also lose something when we no longer have that rawness of being young?

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know which one of these is. It's probably a combination of those. And I actually have asked the same question to myself. To some extent, yes. You know, I'm much older and happier.

Steve Paulson: Right. I would never want to go back to those years.

Steve Paulson: Yeah.

Carlo Rovelli: It's nothing as hard as being a 20-year-old boy, especially if girls are not. And life has been nice. And I'm more content with what I have. So that's one thing. Another thing is historical. I mean, that period I remember very well. I also was reading Sartre and Camus and all this anguish. And Dostoevsky was my absolute - is still now - my preferred writer. That was the after Second World War, when Europe had just committed a dramatic suicide in two acts, First and Second World War. The European intellectual scene was totally confused and desperate. What have we done? We thought we were the pinnacle of civilization and master of the world and ourselves. And the only thing we were able to do is to massacre one another and destroy the continent. I mean, this is a moment of profound spiritual dispersion and being lost. The times have changed. We're not in much better times. We're probably going to the same horror again. But besides the two things, I think it was a real intellectual step ahead for me.

Reading philosophers like Wittgenstein or Nagarjuna, a great Buddhist philosopher, had a big, big intellectual impact on me. And both of them, from completely different traditions, from completely different, two millennia of difference between the two, in common, they have this message, which is, you know, be very careful because you're asking questions which are meaningless. And you're torturing yourself on questions which are meaningless.

Steve Paulson: So one thing that some people who are sort of searching for that, I don't want to call it ultimate reality, but deeper reality, is they seek out transcendent experiences. I mean, it could be psychedelics. It could be something else. And does transcendence, does that have resonance for you or transcendent experiences, are those important to you?

Carlo Rovelli: I was thinking this morning, because I was talking about that. There are certain experiences which are, you know, powerful, changing, taking you outside your normal reality. There are mystical experiences, there are psychedelic experiences, or even, you know, when you're completely in love. So we have an everyday life we go through and then something breaks and we see something completely new, completely different, elsewhere, it's true. Now, is this transcendence in the sense that I should think of the world as the material reality here, which I see every day, and something else, which I rarely, no, no, no. I don't think that there is any substantial metaphysical break of the world between immanent and transcendent, between mind and matter, between spirit and body.

Steve Paulson: So going back to, like, your first LSD experience when you were 17, it changed the way you think.

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.

Steve Paulson: But it didn't, you don't necessarily think it sort of put you in touch with some deeper sense of reality.

Carlo Rovelli: Not any more than the way the first time I looked into the microscope and what looked like water, to my astonishment, everybody's gone through that. You know, there's little bugs moving there, there's incredible richness of things happening. And wow, I've, yes, I've seen more of reality, but it's not transcendent. It's just, you know, bugs down there swimming in the water.

Steve Paulson: It's amazement is what it sounds like.

Carlo Rovelli: It's amazement and it's the realization that reality is far more complex than what we view in our day life. So I think this is a point. If we think that what reality is, is this cup, this table, you and I, a conversation, day and night, and that's basically what the world is about, we're completely wrong, okay? That's the world, what the world is completely wrong for us at our scale at this, you know, one meter, a kilometer, hundred kilometers, a few years. But at just the scale of the microscope, would see, or quantum gravity would see, or the cosmos, reality is far more complicated. There are all these layers. So once you realize that there are all these layers, all this complexity, all this, to split the world into an immanent and a transcendent, it's just silly. I mean, there's more richness than that.

Steve Paulson: So I want to come back. I want to pick up a thread from earlier in the conversation, going back to politics.

Carlo Rovelli: Okay.

Steve Paulson: And you were saying that, you know, you were an active student radical. At a certain point, you just felt like you and your movement had failed. And so you went into physics at that point, you know, maybe changing the world in that sense. But I know you have remained active politically. I mean, a few years ago, you helped get a bunch of Nobel Prize winners to sign a letter. I think more than 50, signing a letter, to reduce military spending and instead use that money for dealing with climate change and poverty and, you know, real social and environmental issues. And I guess I'm wondering if that's, is that just an entirely separate enterprise from what you do as a physicist? Or are they connected in some way?

Carlo Rovelli: Well, for me, they're connected because that's all me. And in a sense, when I, in my late 20s, got into full immersion into science and started spending my time doing calculations and being in front of a blackboard with my friends and colleagues for days, months, years, I was missing the social engagement. And I was even feeling a little bit guilty. It's not, I'm not going to change the world. I learned that. But yet, the good part of the world is thanks to a lot of people who have believed in a better world and worked for it. Worked for, I don't know, equality of human, abolition of slavery, abolition of death penalty. You know, democracy didn't come for free. People fought for it and so on.

Now, more recently, I went back to some sort of engagement like the one you mentioned. Not very successful either. It's the second time.

Steve Paulson: Well, in terms of actually getting countries to reduce their military spending, yeah.

Carlo Rovelli: Yes. Well, the idea was, you know, the idea of that thing and all this Nobel Prize, I got the signature of 60 Nobel Prizes. And the idea was not to ask your own government to reduce military spending. The idea was to ask your own government to start negotiating worldwide for a global common reduction of military spending. Keeping the balance of power. So asking, you know, my country decreased by 2% military spending, but also our enemies, so to say, decreased. So the most stupid thing we humans do is to kill one another and fight. It's obvious. I mean, if we collaborate, everything gets better for everybody. And then we start fighting again because we're irrational. I think that humankind has just one single enemy, its own irrationality that pushes one against the other one.

And I think the people like me who have the privilege of being paid for thinking, essentially, intellectuals of different kinds, have a duty of, you know, I've been paid for thinking. So let me tell you what I'm thinking. Not just on physics.

Steve Paulson: Well, yes. I mean, I was struck by what you said, that you were starting to feel a little guilty. And I guess the question is, feeling a little guilty if you weren't politically engaged in some way. And it raises the question of whether, no matter how cool, how amazing the science of quantum gravity might be, is...

Carlo Rovelli: Is not the most important thing.

Steve Paulson: Yeah, I mean, is there an ethics to this? I don't want to get too heavy-handed here, but how do you think about that? I mean, it's sort of the responsibility of the intellectual, the responsibility of the scientist.

Carlo Rovelli: So the responsibility of the scientists, the physicists in particular, have the burden of the nuclear weapons that have the poisonous gift they've given to humankind, which are seriously risking today to destroy us. Look, my reading of the world is that we're going toward another catastrophe. The West has dominated the world for two or three centuries, is losing its power, but doesn't want to lose it. So it's military-dominating, it's imposing its will on the rest of the planet, the rest of the planet is not happy. This is a dramatically unstable situation. And everybody's demonizing everybody else. So for the Americans, the Russians are all very, very nasty, and so are the Chinese, and vice versa, and so on and so forth. We have in front of us a recipe for a total disaster.

Now, humans sometimes are reasonable, right? I mean, the Soviet Union, the United States sat down and destroyed 80% of their nuclear arsenal, not little because of the push of scientists - the physicists, feeling guilty for what they've done. They said, careful, I mean, just please be reasonable. And Gorbachev is on record as saying that the effect of the scientists pushed him toward that. So why are we not doing the same again? I think that in this moment in which belligerence is growing everywhere, any voice that raises and says, calm down, bring down the heat, discuss, sit, it's a good voice.

Steve Paulson: Yeah, yeah. So we were talking earlier about the wonder of science. I mean, you were just saying it was just amazing, you know, when you first got into doing physics. Is there a politics of wonder?

Carlo Rovelli: Ah! Is there a politics of wonder? Huh. Probably, yes. I don't know. I never thought in these terms. You surprised me here. Wonder is something that makes you change, right? It's exactly what happens when you break out from your routine. You wonder because you discover a new idea, because you're a new person, because you're an experience. Wonder is, for Aristotle, what starts the philosophical search. Wonder triggers curiosity and triggers desire to know.

Steve Paulson: Right. He said all philosophy starts in wonder, I believe.

Carlo Rovelli: He says all philosophy starts in wonder. Yeah. I mean, he says you wonder and then you start thinking and you start, but thinking meaning not being content with the current worldview that you have?

I think, yes. And in a sense, oversimplifying, there are two ways of going through life. One is that, well, I know everything there is to know. I know what I have to do. And the world is what it is. And politically, what is around me, it is fine, no problem. And we are in a very good world from many perspectives, no doubt. We have a fantastically good world, even folding in the current world and, you know, 800 million people who don't have enough food today on the planet. But, you know, in past centuries it was worse, thanks to people who could not take the present for granted and dream something new because they had an idea that fascinated them and because they had wonder.

And science is clearly motivated to wonder. You know, there's this funny thing. Scientists had to control their own emotions and they built up this picture of science, which is emotionless.

Steve Paulson: Right. You're going to corrupt the science if you let your emotions into it.

Carlo Rovelli: You're going to corrupt the science, which to some extent is true, but emotions are the fuel that pushes science. Otherwise, who would be interested in learning something else? Because you're curious, because you want to look at the planet and you say, why do they go around that way around us? You know, you study general relativity, wow. And then you say, how does it go together with quantum? And so on. Is this, and it makes our life so much better, right? To some extent, children who wonder all the time have a wonderful life.

Steve Paulson: Yeah. But I love your… when I asked about the politics of wonder, imagining what a better world would be.

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah.

Steve Paulson: Because so often we just think of wonder as, it's like you walk out in a beautiful forest and that's wonderful. But it's imagining a better world. Wow.

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah. To imagine if there was no war and we could all live in peace.

Steve Paulson: So I have one final question that’s related to what we were just talking about. I mentioned that the podcast we're starting is called Wonder Cabinet, and we're just playing around with this imaginary exercise: if there is an imaginary wonder cabinet - you know, a cabinet of wonders, a cabinet of curiosities in the modern age, in the 21st century, we're trying to collect a library of wonders. So if there was an object or a concept or an experience or whatever it might be - one thing that you'd want to put into that cabinet of wonders - anything come to mind?

Carlo Rovelli: I don't know. I didn't think about that, but you pushed me to discuss so much about this idea that there's no ultimate reality. Can I put this notion into your cabinet of wonders?

Steve Paulson: Yeah, absolutely.

Carlo Rovelli: The absence of an ultimate reality, specifically.

Steve Paulson: Okay.

Carlo Rovelli: This idea that we live in a world of relations, which are sort of mirrors, reflecting mirrors.

Steve Paulson: Okay. I have to think about that. That's the wonderful thing you would put in the cabinet of wonders, is forgetting, or abolishing, the idea that there is ultimate reality.

Carlo Rovelli: Yeah, and I find it beautiful, liberating, sort of full of light, and powerful, incredibly powerful. It leaves space open for everything. It leaves freedom, in a sense. It's okay for your cabinet? You want something more concrete?

Steve Paulson: No, no, that is wonderful. I love it.

Carlo Rovelli: Okay.

Steve Paulson: Thank you. This has been such a pleasure.

Carlo Rovelli: Thank you. Thank you very much.

Steve Paulson: That's the physicist, Carlo Rovelli, talking with us from the Island of Knowledge think tank near Siena, where scientists and philosophers and writers gather in an old chapel under the olive trees. We'll be back with more interviews from Italy in the coming months.

Anne Strainchamps: Wonder Cabinet is produced in Madison, Wisconsin, at our home studios. Our audio engineer is Steve Gotcher. Theme music by Joe Hartke. And our digital producer is Mark Riechers.

Steve Paulson: Support for the Island of Knowledge and Wonder Cabinet comes from Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation. I'm Steve Paulson.

Anne Strainchamps: And I'm Anne Strainchamps. Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for the next episode of Wonder Cabinet. I'll be talking with writer and activist Rebecca Solnit about the moral value of hope and wonder during difficult times.

Steve Paulson: And meanwhile, we'd love to hear from you. Send your questions and comments, and sign up for our newsletter at wondercabinetproductions.com.

Anne Strainchamps: See you next time.