The reconciliation of gravitation and quantization is still one of the most intractable problems in contemporary theoretical physics.
University of Pittsburgh Press quotes
View All Authors View SourcesThe very distinction between spacetime and matter is likely to be ill-founded….
— Carlo Rovelli (1997)
p. 181
I think that the responsibility for the search for the new synthesis is not for physicists alone.
— Carlo Rovelli (1997)
p. 181
I believe that we are going through a period of profound confusion, in which we lack a coherent general picture of the physical world capable of embracing what, or at least most of what, we have learned about it.
— Carlo Rovelli (1997)
p. 180
Physics always deals with two distinct temporalities, which I may denote as the system’s time and the observer’s time.
— Carlo Rovelli (1997)
p. 215
I believe that the essential discovery about nature encoded into general relativity is … that position with respect to a “background” spacetime is a meaningless concept.
— Carlo Rovelli (1997)
p. 209
The “fundamental scientific view of the world” of the present time is characterized by an astonishing amount of perplexity, and disagreement, about what time, space, matter and causality are.
— Carlo Rovelli (1997)
p. 180
The problem seems to me how one can formulate statements about a discontinuum without calling upon a continuum (space-time) as an aid; the latter should be banned from the theory ….
— Albert Einstein (1917)
p. 379