Up@dawn 2.0

Monday, March 18, 2019

Carlo Rovelli on science vs. certainty

Descartes's quest for certainty in the name of science was an error.

"Science is not reliable because it provides certainty. It is reliable because it provides us with the best answers we have at present...

To seek to look further, to go further, seems to me to be one of the splendid things that give sense to life. Like loving, or looking at the sky. The curiosity to learn, to discover, to look over the next hill, the desire to taste the apple: these are the things that make us human..."



“The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous”  Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli
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“And it seems to me that life, this brief life, is nothing other than this: the incessant cry of these emotions that drive us, that we sometimes attempt to channel in the name of a god, a political faith, in a ritual that reassures us that, fundamentally, everything is in order, in a great and boundless love—and the cry is beautiful. Sometimes it is a cry of pain. Sometimes it is a song. And song, as Augustine observed, is the awareness of time. It is time. It is the hymn of the Vedas that is itself the flowering of time.131 In the Benedictus of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the song of the violin is pure beauty, pure desperation, pure joy. We are suspended, holding our breath, feeling mysteriously that this must be the source of meaning. That this is the source of time. Then the song fades and ceases. “The silver thread is broken, the golden bowl is shattered, the amphora at the fountain breaks, the bucket falls into the well, the earth returns to dust.”132 And it is fine like this. We can close our eyes, rest. This all seems fair and beautiful to me. This is time.”
― Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time

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