The joy of physics

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. So far, rights have been sold in 28 countries, including Turkey, Egypt and China. How has Rovelli done it?

When I meet him, he is still struggling to come to terms with his Piketty-like success. ‘My aim was always to write my book for the layman,’ he says. In fact, his book started as a series of newspaper articles — the idea was to write only about the most interesting bits. ‘I decided to focus on the beauty of modern physics and cut out everything which sounded dull.’

In this, he continues a tradition of jargon–free scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin — an art which disappeared in the academic specialisation of the last century.

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In the first of his book’s lessons, Rovelli explains Albert Einstein’s general theory, formulated 100 years ago last month. Aged just 36 years old at the time, Einstein set out a theory of gravity that superseded Isaac Newton’s and treated time and space as essentially the same.