His poetic essay collection Seven Brief Lessons on Physics sold more than a million copies in English translation in 2017 and remains one of the fastest-selling science books ever. Known for his work on loop quantum gravity theory and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaximander, Rovelli is one of our great scientific explicators. Fortunately, the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli writes of “warped time” and other tentative physics with incisive clarity. Einstein’s notion that time and space are essentially one (the concept of curved “spacetime”) is the stuff of abstract poetry. Nobody said that relativity theory was easy. Albert Einstein was indeed Jewish, but had he masterminded a “world crisis” in physics, as the anti-relativity lobby insisted? Hardly. To forward-looking German physicists such as Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg, the idea that relativity was a “Jewish fraud” was manifest nonsense. “German physics” (sometimes called “Aryan physics”) failed to make inroads in 1930s Germany because its champions were so plainly deluded. The troubling uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity and other physical exotica were viewed as “Jewish science” inimical to German nationhood and the Newtonian mechanics of Deutsche Physik. I n Hitler’s Germany, a handful of physicists bristled at the mere mention of quantum theory.
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