Rovelli has written a book on the Greek philosopher Anaximander, published in France, Italy, US [21] and Brazil. The book analyses the main aspects of scientific thinking and articulates Rovelli's views on science. Anaximander is presented in the book as a main initiator of scientific thinking. Rovelli's first book is on the Italian student political movements in the 1970s. [26] He later refused to compulsory military draft and was briefly detained. van Fraassen, Bas C. (11 July 2009). "Rovelli's World" (PDF). Foundations of Physics. 40 (4): 390–417. Bibcode: 2010FoPh...40..390V. doi: 10.1007/s10701-009-9326-5. S2CID 17217776.

The Oxford Literary Festival has in my mind become the leading literary festival of the year. The organisation, the roster of speakers, the ambience and the sheer quality of it all is superb. May it now go from strength to strength each year stretching its ambition more and more. I believe it will. In 1994, Rovelli introduced the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, based on the idea that the quantum state of a system must always be interpreted relative to another physical system (like the "velocity of an object" is always relative to another object, in classical mechanics). [16] The idea has been developed and analyzed in particular by Bas van Fraassen [17] and by Michel Bitbol. Among other important consequences, it provides a solution of the EPR paradox that does not violate locality. [18]

The effort to reconstruct Anaximander's ideas from indirect sources has been extensive, but does ultimately show that this man was the first to undertake scientific thinking as we know it today. Anaximander was always searching for knowledge to progress his understanding of the world.

For example, Parmenides, certainly not a “scientist”, explicitly separated the world as it appears to us (the world of “seeming”) from the world as it really is (the world of “truth”). Aristotle refined a method of presenting the thoughts of earlier philosophers as a basis for his own arguments and positions, providing an explicit structure for progress in thought, but not a method of science per se. The Earth is a body of finite dimensions floating in space. It doesn’t fall because there is no particular direction toward which it might fall. It is “dominated by no other body.” I was looking for the author’s brief lessons in physics and spotted this book as well. To be honest, I thought this one sounded more interesting than the lessons book, so I grabbed it too. It’s a curious little book. Rovelli, a contemporary physicist, uses the accomplishments of Anaximander of Miletus, the pre-Socratic thinker who is credited with writing the first prose work and whom Rovelli describes as the first scientist, as a springboard for meditations on the nature of science and its history. The book is well-written, and although Rovelli is not a historian or philosopher of science I didn't find anything which was obviously wrong, as I often do with books about ancient philosophy. His popular science book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, was originally published in Italian in 2014. It has been translated into 41 languages [4] and has sold over a million copies worldwide. [5] In 2019, he was included by Foreign Policy magazine in a list of 100 most influential global thinkers. [6] Life and career [ edit ]

What is time, what is space? (interview), Di Renzo Editore, 2006 / Che cos'è il tempo, che cos'é lo spazio?, Di Renzo Editore, 2004. The final chapter where he takes on religion is the only really weak part of the book, as anti-religious polemic usually is -- I think it's necessary, but so little is understood about the origins of religion that there is much speculation, as Rovelli admits. His choice of writers to discuss on the subject is obviously subjective and not the writers I would probably choose myself.