Carlo Rovelli on the Dangers of Getting Trapped Inside Your Own Conceptual Framework

Before arriving at the quanta to which this first lesson is devoted, allow me to begin with a simple observation. We humans inhabit the surface of the planet Earth, and this is a rather peculiar place: it has aspects that are not at all common in the universe. They are not unique—most likely there are plenty of planets similar to Earth—but most of the vast cosmos is very different from our narrow home.

The peculiarities of the surface of our planet lead us to prejudices that make it difficult for us to understand that vaster world. The surface of the Earth is very small. So small indeed that it takes light a mere tenth of a second to travel around it: a mea-sure smaller than we are capable of perceiving with our senses.

This is why we communicate in a way that seems instantaneous to us: we speak by telephone between Paris and Shanghai as if we were standing next to each other. We could not do this with a friend who lived in a different solar system. It takes years for a signal to travel back from even the nearest of stars.

The smallness of the Earth gives us the impression that there is a shared common Time; that it always makes sense to ask what is happening somewhere else right now; that we could just make a call to find out. But it is not so in the larger, vast world. The idea of a shared, common time works well here, between ourselves, neighbors on the same planet.

But it does not work in the rest of the universe. A child born in a village naturally thinks that the whole world is like that village. On Earth there are objects.

A stone, a pen, a house—these are objects, things. Solid entities, well-defined, stable over time. This leads us to believe that nature is made up of such things.