Review: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Rovelli's is a Ronseal kind of book. It is brief - the only 80 pages or so contains nothing more than what is promised by the title.

But such matter of factness conceals some profound beauty. The mental picture I was left with of a warping and stretching space-time after the first lesson (on the General Theory of Relativity) is so utterly simple that it is magnificent.

"Ever since we discovered that the 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."

The other essays are similarly elegant although not always successful in their explanations. I came away still puzzled about loop quantum gravity.

And this is perhaps one of the best lessons any study of physics can impart to the ignorant layperson: acceptance. Acceptance of the weird, the strange and the completely contradictory.