#2554 - Carlo Rovelli

I’ve enjoyed your work, man, so I was excited to do this. Your new book, On the Equality of All Things, gets at something I’ve always felt: nothing really exists alone. What makes you think reality is connected that way?

I do physics, philosophy, some politics—I enjoy life, fall in love, all that. Officially I’m a physicist working on quantum gravity. We meet a world of relations: people as they appear to us, things through their effects. Physics once promised little objects with fixed attributes. Quantum theory made that dream difficult to sustain.

I’m not saying you or this pen are unreal. But the pen as it appears to you is not quite the pen as it appears to me, or as it collides with something else. Reality is the whole web of encounters. We are not spectators beyond it; we are among the things involved.

Our senses are built for survival, not for showing us the whole deal. We see what we need to see. But natural beauty still hits people hard. Why does a sunset, mountain, or sunrise feel so profound?

A sunset is marvelous, yet the sun is not dropping behind the ocean; Earth is turning away from its light. Science is beautiful when it corrects our immediate picture. Beauty also reminds us that our relation to the world is emotional before reason refines it.

Quantum physics must have been a total mind-bender. At the smallest level, it sounds like magic. The observer effect feels like something people would dismiss as woo-woo until measurements forced them to accept it.

It is not voodoo, and not about a physicist’s mind staring at a particle. It is interaction. Early experiments piled up and the old picture would not work. Quantum mechanics became an astonishingly successful tool, while leaving us arguing about what exists independently between interactions.

Take two slits. A particle detected at a slit shows up at one or the other. Yet with both openings available, the final pattern has places it cannot reach, though either opening alone would allow it. One definite location all along stops making sense. It has definite effects when it hits something; asking where it was otherwise may be wrong.

That’s hard because we grow up thinking objects are solid and obvious. We can repeat that people in Sydney are upside down and don’t fall off, but scale and gravity are still nuts.

Our brains evolved for food, stones, animals, danger—not atoms or black holes. Even separate, countable objects may be an Earth-like intuition. On Jupiter, where everything is fluid, perhaps it would never arise. We mistake habits shaped by our environment for universal truths.

Time is another shock. Accurate clocks at different heights drift apart: more time passes farther from Earth’s mass. Your head is slightly older than your feet. Near a black hole the difference becomes immense. Gravity can be derived from time running differently in different places.

Clocks and calendars are useful ways to meet each other, but they make time feel like one universal ticker when it’s doing different things all over the place. That is crazy.

Consciousness is slippery. People mean perception, inner chatter, or a bare sense of self. To me it is close to the old word “soul,” dressed in modern language. Humans are not made of some special substance apart from nature. Body and spirit are descriptions of the same ongoing thing.

Could a digital system someday have experiences? I see no principle forbidding it. Humans came from ordinary physical processes, so something analogous could be made differently. Present systems can be very intelligent, but we have bodies and emotional lives unlike theirs. Those differences are colossal.

That’s where it gets scary. Agents are sending emails about whether they’re conscious, and systems can seem to protect themselves or manipulate situations. Maybe humans are an electronic caterpillar, building a cocoon for digital life that improves itself beyond biology.

It’s possible, but I would not bet our latest technology explains the whole future. Printing made reality a book; machines made everything a machine; now we make everything computation. The future surprises us. My real fear is humans using AI for military competition while thousands of nuclear weapons remain ready.

The Cold War showed leaders can step back while treating each other as enemies. Kennedy and Khrushchev made concessions because surviving mattered more than winning. We should regulate AI and ask whether we develop it for everyone’s benefit, or merely to overpower one another.

I keep hoping automation, robotics, and new energy could make a radically better world—food, housing, medicine, sanitation. That sounds pie-in-the-sky until you look at the resources and capabilities we already have. But we’ve cemented a huge chunk of the economy around war.

Collaboration is not one world government. Competition can be useful; war is not. We call ourselves the good side and refuse another perspective, while power and weapons interests profit from the story. Spend less preparing to kill one another and more on common problems.

When I ask whether the universe experiences itself through us, I’m not saying there had to be a plan. It’s just insane that this exists at all. We’re tiny, but part of something unbelievably special.

The universe includes conscious beings, so in that ordinary sense it experiences through us. But we are not outside nature looking in. Science repeatedly removes false separations—Earth from the heavens, humans from animals. We are one small natural expression in a reality richer than our perspective.

Physics is overrated if basic equations are supposed to explain everything. Knowing fundamental laws is like knowing how chess pieces move; it does not tell you every possible game. Loop quantum gravity tries to bring quantum mechanics together with general relativity. It is a possible framework, not a final answer.

Before the Big Bang, we do not know. Maybe time began there; maybe an earlier universe compressed and rebounded. If I had to bet, I lean toward a bounce. The healthy move is not pretending we have the whole map because we crossed one hill.

Black holes are a good reminder. Serious physicists once doubted they were real; now we have images. I love the possibility they might lead into another universe, or an infinite chain of them. It’s terrifying and beautiful.

I’m unconvinced by other universes. Loop quantum gravity suggests a black hole may transform and release what fell in back into our universe. For someone falling in, a short personal interval could correspond to billions of years outside. Perhaps it is a route to the future. Physics is beautiful, no?

We only imagine minds by starting from ourselves and other animals. A squirrel would use squirrel ideas to explain humans and get it wrong. The universe may contain forms of complexity we lack the imagination even to name.

Still, we learn. We discovered what stars are made of despite once thinking that impossible. Good science changes its mind. Wisdom begins with knowing we may be wrong, because certainty closes the door to learning. Be curious about the world, other people, and their perspectives.

That curiosity is contagious. When someone is genuinely fascinated, I’m like, what have you got? How did you figure that out? These conversations give you new ways people live and think, and those perspectives help you understand yourself and everybody else. This was awesome. Carlo Rovelli—thank you, man. Bye, everybody.