Ian Thomson

The joy of physics

Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics has outsold even Fifty Shades of Grey in his native Italy

issue 12 December 2015

Physics is said to go deeper than other sciences into the riddle of existence. The laws of physics — gravity, energy, motion, time — underpin those of chemistry, astrophysics and meteorology combined. So an understanding of the world requires a basic understanding of physics; something which has just become a little easier thanks to a cult book by an Italian academic which is due to be stuffed into an extraordinary number of stockings this Christmas.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Prof Carlo Rovelli, has already sold more copies in his native Italy than Fifty Shades of Grey. The English translation has become Penguin’s fastest-selling science debut ever. In less than 80 pages, Ravelli’s slim poetic meditation seeks to clarify the troubling uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity, quantum theory and other physical exotica. Not since Stephen Hawking’s (admittedly hard-going) Brief History of Time has there been such a consensual success in the science book market.

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