To the very last...................

 

     When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration.*  When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of his blackboard in his study.  There's a drawing on it.  A drawing of the "light-filled box" in Einstein's thought experiment.  To the very last, the desire to challenge one-self and understand more.  And to the very last: doubt.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

*"With the death of Albert Einstein, a life in the service of science and humanity which was as rich and fruitful as any in the whole history of our culture has come to an end. Mankind will always be indebted to Einstein for the removal of the obstacles to our outlook which were involved in the primitive notions of absolute space and time." -Niels Bohr

Einstein's jewel............................

 

     There are absolute masterpieces that move us intensely: Mozart's Requiem, Homer's Odyssey, the Sistine Chapel, King Lear.  To fully appreciate their brilliance may require a long apprenticeship, but the reward is sheer beauty—and not only this, but the opening of our eyes to a new perspective upon the world.  Einstein's jewel, the general theory of relativity, is a masterpiece of this order.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

raising the veil........................

 

Every so often I would raise my eyes from the book and look at the glittering sea: it seemed to me that I was actually seeing the curvature of space and time imagined by Einstein.  As if by magic: as if a friend were whispering into my ear an extraordinary hidden truth, suddenly raising the veil of reality to disclose a simpler, deeper order.  Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us: every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience.  Another veil has fallen.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

an equation.........................

 

Einstein wrote an equation that says that R is equivalent to the energy of matter.  That is to say: space curves where there is matter.  That is it.  The equation fits into half a line, and there is nothing more.  A vision—that space curves—became an equation.

     But within this equation there is a teeming universe.  And here the magical richness of the theory opens up into a phantasmagorical succession of predictions that resemble the delirious ravings of a madman but all have turned out to be true.

-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics