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Perhaps its Rovellis writing style, along with his facility with ideas, that sets him apart from other popular science writers. For some readers, he said, the writing in my books is what matters to them. And the truth is I use analogies, some poetical, but its not coloring or embellishment. Its actually where Im trying to go, trying to transmit some emotion, some sense of marvel, some sense of the core.

Simon Carnell, along with his late wife, Erica Segre, translated five of Rovellis books, including his new one. He said in an email that he sees Rovellis style as highly compressed without ever becoming dry or airless. He added that Rovelli has the scientific instinct to avoid and pare away every superfluous word (including of the translations of his work), but more importantly, a writerly ability to do so in the service of a style that is elegant, lively and above all engaging.

Beyond offering Rovellis heady but lean synthesis of science and the humanities, his new book also features pieces dealing with politics, climate change and justice. Dean Rickles, a professor of history and philosophy of modern physics at the University of Sydney, said in an interview over Zoom that this larger project of Rovellis, with its theme of interdependence, is particularly compelling.

Hes concerned now with justice and with peace and with climate. He has become a sort of very political scientist, he said. I think you can boil it all down, actually, to sort of a quality, like a democracy in all things Were all interdependent.

Maybe the best way to think of Rovellis worldview is through the work of Ngrjuna, a second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher he admires. Author of The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, Ngrjuna taught that there is no unchanging, underlying, stable reality that nothing is self-contained, that all is variable, interdependent. Reality, in short, is always something other than what it just was, or seemed to be, he argues. To define it is to misunderstand it.

In Emptiness is Empty: Ngrjuna, another piece from his new book, Rovelli writes about how the philosophers conception of reality provokes a sense of awe, a sense of serenity, but without consolation: To understand that we do not exist is something that may free us from attachments and from suffering; it is precisely on account of lifes impermanence, the absence from it of every absolute, that life has meaning.

Before leaving Rovellis home that day, I took another look at the concealing snow outside. Reality seemed at once more compelling and more mysterious. Hesitating, I asked him if he thought there was any grand, capital T truth. He indulged me, then paused for a moment.

Read more:

Searching for What Connects Us, Carlo Rovelli Explores Beyond Physics - The New York Times