There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness review – the universal genius of Carlo Rovelli

What do Black Holes and Covid-19 have in common? Quite a lot says Carlo Rovelli, superstar physicist and author, though perhaps in a different dimension and idiom of thought and perception.

We were talking on the occasion of the publication in English this week of his collection of essays and Op-Eds, fondi, in the Italian press – “There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness.” It is a compendium of thoughts and reflections on anything and anyone from Black Holes, to climate change, tolerance, Churchill on Science, Raimon Llull, Dante and Einstein, Darwin, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking – and above living and learning together. It is the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius for our age – only many times better and more enlivening. The writing is sparkling, provocative and gentle, and the translation is beyond elegant.

As to the question about Covid and Black Holes, the common thread, according to Rovelli, is that they test the very bounds of knowledge and understanding. Where the one has challenged the human mind in mathematics, physics and cosmology, the coronavirus crisis has tested the bounds of comprehension both of ourselves and our society as living organisms.

The heroes of the book stretch across the centuries – from Democritus (whom he rates as high or higher than Aristotle) to Einstein, le Maitre, Penrose and Hawking in our own day. The destruction of the writings and calculations of Democritus, pioneer of atomic theory, he regards as one of the greatest acts of vandalism in history. More fortunate is the fate of Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things”, a mould-breaker as much as the works of Galileo or Darwin. The essay on Lucretius and the building blocks of life is one of the most thrilling of the book. It carries the Rovelli hallmark – the ability to open a new line of thinking and to refresh stale assumptions in old thoughts.

The conversation, in English, was every bit as witty and spritely as his writing. Despite the chuntering medium of Zoom and crashing computers, I was pretty well aware of being in the presence of a wonderfully engaging person – Shakespeare’s Ariel with super-galactic intellect and charm.

By chance, an essay written in 2011 is about Roger Penrose, a friend and collaborator on several projects, and winner of a Nobel prize for Physics this year for his work on Black Holes. Rovelli compares him to Einstein, another great hero of these essays. “Roger Penrose like Einstein has no fear of making mistakes”, he says with admiration.

“Many of our ideas about Black Holes come from Roger Penrose and his work in the 1960s, for which he has won the prize. He made us take Black Holes seriously – until then, and from Einstein, they had been treated almost as scientific curiosity. It has hard to overestimate the enormous influence he has had.”

“He brought a new way of thinking about these things – which squeeze matter to astonishing density – giving a completely new aspect of reality. And the sky is full of these things – raising fundamental questions about gravity, and the properties of space and time.”

He depicts his friend as a “low-key, gentle man, very kind, absorbed in his intellectual journey which has been deep and extremely variegated. He’s gone all over, in all sorts of directions. He has produced some extremely remarkable ideas.”

Penrose became interested in a mathematical approach to the sequencing of DNA. “It didn’t work, but from it came a great idea and a whole way of thinking we still use in mathematics. He could have won a Nobel in two disciplines – mathematics and physics.” Marie Curie, subject of another luminous essay, did win two Nobels – “and was completely untouched by her fame.”

Penrose’s colleague and collaborator, and another friend, Stephen Hawking he sees rather differently. “He was one of the great scientific thinkers of the time – but there is much more to him than that. It is the immensity of his personality. He was a joyful happy spirit, and despite his horrible disability was incredibly productive. He was spiritually happy in communicating – talking to everybody. So many of my pupils say they were drawn to physics by Hawking and his book, A Brief History of Time.”

Another extraordinary guide and help to Rovelli’s teaching and mathematics is Dante Alighieri – subject of one of the sharpest, and surprising, chapters. Einstein admired and respected the cosmology that drives the whole journey and schema of the Divine Comedy, written just over 700 years ago. In particular Einstein and Rovelli point to the depiction of the three spheres of the cosmos, interlocking, merging and separating – a motif Rovelli still uses with students to this day.

“What I find so remarkable is his intelligence. Dante has an incredibly brilliant mind. It is a great universal mind. Yes, he is comparable to Shakespeare – for their understanding of human nature and a complete world picture.

“Dante has a vast universe and with just a few characters shows the complexity of politics and society – and does it across a large spectrum of feelings. Shakespeare, though, has depth of psychology, and the interaction of drama with players – whereas Dante has characters.”

Dante is a constant companion across the essays. Why? “When I was working in Pittsburgh I was in my 40s, and felt a bit disconnected. I was cut off from Italians and Italian. I started reading Dante again. Of course, I knew Dante from school, but then I came across this vast universe.” The drama, the depth and the colour became engrossing.

Oddly, we both had to confess our favourite of the three books is Purgatory, the earthly journey up the mountain, concluding with Dante swapping guides form Virgil to the celestial of Beatrice Portinari. As Rovelli says, “It’s the colour, the sights and smells of earth and the sheer drama” that makes this part of the Divine Comedy so remarkable. Purgatory teams with fellow poets and is filled with mini essays on political thought, and poetry. And there is the sheer luminous density of the poetry – surely appealing to the leading pioneer of Quantum and Black Holes?

Then there is the rhyming pattern in which it is written – the tri rhyme terza rima, which is cannot be translated into English. A perfect example of its powerful effect is in a dramatic passage telling of the abduction and murder in exile of the Sienese noble woman Pia de’ Tolomei. Consider the following five words:

“Siena mi fe, disfecemi Maremma” (Siena made me, in the Maremma – badlands – I was undone).

Rovelli then explained to me that the sheer power and depth of Dante’s cosmology led him to Dante’s master Brunetto Latini. Latini wrote two books that still endure and he opens up another mysterious side to Dante. He was a follower of the Spiritual Franciscans, radical mystics who were inspired by Joachim of Floris, a remote abbey in Calabria. His prophecies, and brilliant whirling and elaborate designs, are the among the most significant in the millenarian tradition. The Spirituals inform the background to Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose and Latini’s teachings of a new political millennium to come inspired both Nazi and Bolshevik propaganda.

The Rovelli essays range from a solitary pilgrimage among the tribes of north Tanzania, Darwin’s tree of life and learning, LSD, worsening inequality, to climate change and good behaviour in modern politics and politicians. These need to focus on four priorities, war and confrontation, climate change, inequality, all of which seem to be getting worse in so many communities and countries, as well as the ineluctable, and too often forgotten, problem of atomic arsenals.

His essay on Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” describes how the political hard Right dwells on fear, specifically the fear of appearing weak. The book displays “the intimate logic of violence.”

“What can we learn from this? I think it teaches us that, in order to avoid catastrophes, we do not need to defend ourselves against others: we need to fight against our fear of them.”

This brings us back to Covid-19 and Black Holes. Both expose human fragility and the limits of our knowledge. When it comes to Covid, “we find ourselves much less powerful than we thought. Collectively, we have been making mistakes how we deal with it. We could have done better, by working together. We are facing something totally new. We might disagree, but we must work for the common good. We know so little about our future, and we must realise we are fighting for our way of being human.”

Black Holes also tease our fragility and the limits of knowledge and understanding. “There are billions of them. Imagine something tens of billions of times the size of the sun, falling in on itself to the size of a gold ball, and then at the heart there is huge energy and nothing. Time stops. And we just don’t know. It tests our understanding of the beginnings of everything.”

And so the story continues – as Homer, of the Simpson family or the chronicler of Odysseus, might say.

In the book, as in our chat, Carlo Rovelli is an incomparable, kind, witty, illuminating, companion and guide. May his writings and teaching continue.

My feeling at the end of the book brought to mind the ending lines of Purgatory, in Dante’s Divine Comedy:

Io dalla santissim’ onda

rifatto sì, come piante novella

rinnovellate di novella fronda,

puro e disposto a salire alle stelle.

I turned from the sacred wave, remade,

like plants renewed with new leaves,

purified and ready to ascend to the stars.

Carlo Rovelli – There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness. Published by Allen Lane, £15.39.