A fantastic little book about, well, just about everything. Rovelli is fascinating. From Islam in Senegal to Black Holes, probabilities, Covid and Dante, this book will force you to think.

Why do we frame new knowledge as rejecting the old? Galileo & Newton improved Aristotle, and learned from him too. Einstein didn’t disprove Newton, they had a dialogue.

Sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, plank by plank, standing on the old deck while making it new.

I took most from the part about the symbiotic relationship of science & arts. How the poetry of Dante & Leopardi provided new ways to think about the world. The scientific method needs ideas for testing, and science doesn’t discriminate about from where they come.

Another take-away was The Paradise of Time Travel by David Lewis, which is certainly worth a read.

Most of all Rovelli never lets us forget how we know what we believe we know. His framing of probability is enlightening. Probability is a measure of confidence an outcome based on what we know at that time. We should never be too certain about what we know. A theory can only be disproven. Our truths are just the things that aren’t yet known false. Bayes describes how we become more or less certain as we observe.

And so much more.