2026-09-30
38 分钟The Economist.
Physicists usually want to explain everything.
Their hope is that maybe, one day, they'll discover the deepest truths to the universe.
A single equation, perhaps,
which can explain what everything is made of and from which all the other laws of the universe can be derived.
Our guest today, though a distinguished physicist himself, doesn't buy that hunt for the theory of everything.
Fundamental physics is overrated.
It doesn't at all explain the universe.
If you know the basic moves of chess playing, you're not chess master.
If you know the basic laws of physics, you haven't yet begun to understand how chemical reactions work,
how biological systems work, how our conversations work.
I do believe that our conversation is nothing else than photons, electrons and protons.
But that's completely useless information to talk to you.
Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist.
In the 1980s, he and his collaborators were looking for ways to reconcile quantum physics,
the stuff of the very small, with general relativity, the theory that explains large-scale structures in the universe.
They ended up introducing an idea called loop quantum gravity, which says that space isn't smooth,
but in fact granular, composed of a network of interconnected loops.
He's perhaps more famous, though, as one of the great writers on physics.
Several of his books on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics have been international bestsellers.