translated by Juan Manuel Salmerón Arjona
At 260+ pages, this is the longest book by Rovelli I’ve read (the other two are Siete Breves Lecciones de Fisica and El orden del tiempo) and the least satisfactory one. Maybe it is translation (the other two were translated by Francisco J. Ramos Mena), maybe repetitiveness, or maybe the contrast between well-explained and left-pretty-much-unexplained. For instance: Rovelli says, half-jokingly, that a theory is not credible if its equations don’t fit on a T-shirt. Fair enough. I like that. Then he puts the equations of loop quantum gravity theory on an image of a T-shirt (Fig. 7.7) without explaining anything about these equations. Not fair at all, and not even funny. In fact, Reality (2014) precedes The Order of Time (2017) and I have an impression that in the latter book Rovelli was able to address the shortcomings of the former.
Still, Reality is a fascinating read. I might not care that much about spin foam but I loved the historical bits, especially those on Dirac, Matvei Bronstein, and Rovelli’s recurring theme, Democritus.
No comments:
Post a Comment