#2554 - Carlo Rovelli

Carlo Rovelli (0:01)

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:06)

Shrain by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Very nice to meet you.

Carlo Rovelli (0:13)

Joe Rogan, I'm very happy. Thank you very much for inviting us to the invitation.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

I'm happy to talk to you. I've enjoyed your work, so it's very exciting for me.

Carlo Rovelli (0:20)

Oh, fantastic.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

I've heard many conversations with you. First of all, please tell everybody what you do.

Carlo Rovelli (0:26)

What do I do?

Joe Rogan (0:27)

Yes. I should probably start more podcasts out this way.

Carlo Rovelli (0:33)

I do science, I do philosophy, I do some politics, I enjoy life, I fall in love, I do all the things people do in life. All kinds of things, yes.

Officially, my job description is a physicist. I do quantum gravity, theoretical physics.

Joe Rogan (0:47)

And the pitch that they sent me, I guess...

Carlo Rovelli (0:53)

Who is they?

Joe Rogan (0:54)

I don't know who the publicists are. Okay.

On the equality of all things?

Carlo Rovelli (0:59)

The book. It's the last book I published. Yes.

I'm going to publish. It's coming out in a few days.

Joe Rogan (1:04)

Yeah, it comes out September 15th. And what are we at today? Today is the 8th. This is a very fascinating subject.

You're talking about that things don't exist in isolation.

Carlo Rovelli (1:17)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:17)

That everything is somehow connected.

Carlo Rovelli (1:21)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:22)

But I've always sort of intuitively suspected that that was the case. There's probably something to that. But to hear a person like you say it, it makes me much happier.

Like, OK, maybe I'm on the right track. Like, what gives you this inclination? And why did you want to write about this?

Carlo Rovelli (1:43)

Yeah, I'm not surprised you say so, because that you sort of feel that that makes sense. Because in a sense, it's what we're used to, right, in our everyday life.

We interact with persons, and persons are the way they interact with us and them, their relations, their stuff. We always see things from our own perspective. Then somehow science, physics in particular, seemed to be telling us, OK, no, no, yes, OK, there is all this perspective, there is an objective, fixed reality down there. We can look at it from the outside, it's made by little things, each one with its own properties.

Except that in the evolution of physics itself, in relative recent time, the last century, with quantum mechanics, this idea of an objective reality doesn't work much. And so, in a sense, we're going back to a more intuitive picture of the world. The very idea of an objective reality down there might be wrong. In fact, I think it's wrong. And I think that's what quantum mechanics is telling us.

Joe Rogan (2:52)

So when you say objective reality, meaning the reality that we're seeing and experiencing, that this is just a tiny fraction of what's real, or that we're getting a distorted perception of what's real?

Carlo Rovelli (3:03)

We are getting a perception, a perspective on what is real. I mean, I see you, you're real, of course. I see this pen, this pen is real, of course. I'm not denying that there is some reality. But the way you see the pen is different from mine, of course, just because you see it from the other side. So you have a perspective, I have a perspective. The question is, do all these perspectives match perfectly into a unique objective reality of the pen? I think quantum mechanics telling us no.

Reality is this ensemble of perspectives. The properties of the pen, where it is, its color, how long it is, all the property of the pen, are not really properties of the pen, it's how the pen looks to you, how the pen looks to me. Not just you and me as human beings, how the pen clashes another pen, how it affects another pen.

So we should understand, I think, reality as this network of interaction, how things look to everything else. Which is a more beautiful picture of reality than just we being outside and looking from the outside. We're inside reality, we are part of reality. So what we see is just a part of how things interact with another, is how they interact with us.

Joe Rogan (4:13)

So when you're talking about objective reality, so one of the problems that human beings have is our senses. We assume that our senses see everything that's there to be seen. That doesn't really make sense.