Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Carlo Rovelli

Mysteries – I have never seen the vast inner chambers of the Great Pyramids; but, I have walked through a portion of the underground, 4-mile-long Tevatron tunnel buried deep beneath Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Accompanied by a half-dozen old and new friends, each of us took turns gazing through a small opening within a wall of cement blocks to peek at the decommissioned CDF Stand. For a long time, physicist Luciano Ristori (a friend of the magician Eugene Burger and our guide for the afternoon) oversaw the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) and a team of 600 scientists from 60 universities and institutions in 13 countries that are working to unlock the mysteries of the universe, deepen our understanding of the Higgs boson (the so-called “God Particle”), and decipher the secrets of human life’s very existence. The visit was nothing less than breathtaking. In this excellent book, physicist Carlo Rovelli attempts the impossible and largely succeeds; using relatively simple language, Rovelli summarizes the General Theory of Relativity, quantum mechanics, “the architecture of the universe,” elementary particles, quantum gravity, and probability and the heat of black holes. He ends by poetically contemplating human life’s very existence. The result? As breathtaking as the underground tour Eugene arranged for Robert Charles, Dr. Jenny Pauls, Bryce Kuhlman and me in the summer of 2014. I left the tour and closed this excellent book thinking a similar thought: Why do humans tell stories? Because we don’t know our own story.