Increasing Understanding Of Our Surroundings

Rovelli believes that humans’ understanding of their physical surroundings is improving over the ages. He speaks, for example, of “the numerous leaps forward in our understanding that have succeeded each other over the course of history” (4). This is the most common view of the natural sciences, and perhaps part of their basic principles. Rovelli believes in truth and pursues some abstract set of rules, mechanisms, or foundations that are inherent to the external physical world. Discussing his understanding of relativity, he explains that it was “as if a friend was whispering into my ear an extraordinary hidden truth, suddenly raising the veil of reality to disclose a simpler, deeper order. Ever since we discovered that the Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us: every time we glimpse a new aspect...