In a conversation filled with loops, black holes, grains of space, this interview with physicist and historian Carlo Rovelli also poses the fascinating question, “What if time didn’t exist?”
Our understanding of the universe rests on two pillars: the theory of general relativity and quantum physics. Two theoretical constructions whose accuracy is nowadays precisely verified, but which do not speak to each other, which ignore each other, so to speak. Some researchers, such as the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, are working to fill this gap. Among other research directors at the CNRS and a professor at the Université de la Méditerranée in Marseille, Carlo Rovelli has developed, with the American Lee Smolin, the theory of quantum gravitation with loops aimed, as it were, at unifying general relativity and quantum physics.
Even if all this remains largely mysterious and incomprehensible to most of us, the sky lights up a little as we listen to Carlo Rovelli at the microphone of Stéphane Deligeorges in “Continent sciences”. In the course of a conversation filled with loops, black holes, grains of space, strings and networks of spins, a fascinating question arose which is also the title of a book by Carlo Rovelli: “What if time didn’t exist?”