Carlo Rovelli

Theoretical Physicist & Author

About

Carlo Rovelli (born 1956) is an Italian theoretical physicist and writer, one of the founders of loop quantum gravity — an approach that treats space and time themselves as quantized rather than as a smooth backdrop. He is emeritus professor at the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille, a distinguished visiting research chair at the Perimeter Institute, and a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University. His work on relational quantum mechanics and the physics of time argues that time is not fundamental but emerges from deeper, timeless physics. His popular books—'Seven Brief Lessons on Physics,' 'The Order of Time,' 'Reality Is Not What It Seems,' and 'Helgoland'—have sold millions of copies and made him one of the most widely read living physicists.

Key Contributions

Co-founded loop quantum gravity, showing that area and volume are quantized at the smallest scales
Introduced relational quantum mechanics, in which a system's state is always relative to another physical system
Proposed, with Alain Connes, the thermal time hypothesis — time emerging from thermodynamics rather than being fundamental
Developed 'physics without time' formulations for quantum gravity, where dynamics need not reference a background time
Wrote 'Seven Brief Lessons on Physics' and 'The Order of Time,' bringing frontier physics and the philosophy of time to millions of readers
His relational and timeless accounts of nature are elegant and widely influential, though they remain contested interpretations rather than settled physics

Questions they sharpened View the streams

What is real?

1996

Reality isn't built of things with intrinsic properties; it's built of relations. A quantum system has no observer-independent state — its properties are events that hold relative to other systems. To be real is to make a difference to something else.

Videos & Interviews

We Merged With Machines a Long Time Ago | Google's Blaise Agüera y Arcas & Physicist Carlo Rovelli

Berggruen "Futurology" dialogue in which Blaise Agüera y Arcas makes the case to physicist Carlo Rovelli that artificial general intelligence has already arrived — tracing intelligence back to modeling others and cooperating to survive, and arguing the human–machine merger is not coming but is how we got here.

View Details

The Physics and Philosophy of Time - with Carlo Rovelli

Royal Institution lecture drawn from Rovelli's book "The Order of Time" — how our understanding of time has been transformed from Boltzmann and Einstein to loop quantum gravity, and why the past–future distinction and the present itself dissolve on closer inspection.

View Details