May the way the world works remain forever mysterious
Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist, is one of the great scientific explicators of our time. His wafer-thin essay collection, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2015), managed to clarify the unsettling uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity, quantum theory and other physical exotica. It sold more than a million copies in English translation alone. Not since Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time had there been such a consensual success in the science book market. In later bestsellers such as The Order of Time and White Holes, Rovelli continued a tradition of popular scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specialisations of the past century. The French call it haute vulgarisation – high-class popularisation. Rovelli excels at it.
