On the Equality of All Things: Lessons on Physics and Philosophy

A radical new vision of reality from one of the great minds of our time, mapping a watershed moment in both physics and philosophy.

“Carlo Rovelli is the best thinker out there articulating physics, philosophy, and literature. There simply are no scientists of his caliber who also are humanists of the first order. His prose has the enviable ability to expand the realm of the utterable and, with it, the reach of our intellectual experience.” —Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust

We are living in an age of scientific advancement on par with that of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton: a period of discovery that has so fundamentally revolutionized our understanding of the world that it has shaken our most basic assumptions about who we are and our relationship to all things. In On the Equality of All Things, Carlo Rovelli turns his attention to this reckoning, bringing expertise and clarity to both the most mind-bending theories of modern physics and the most fundamental questions imaginable about the nature of time and existence.

Drawing from the latest advances in science and the teachings of modern and ancient philosophers, Rovelli invites us into the universe we thought we knew—one that is not made of things but of relationships. Time is a string of events, and there is no present time in the universe. Cause and effect are an illusion, and reality is an intricate and fragile web. And knowledge itself will always be imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

This is an awe-inspiring meditation on science, meaning, and being that charts the strange majesty of the world we’ve always lived in—from a thinker unafraid to challenge not only centuries of philosophers but our own intuitions about the nature of reality and what organizes it.

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time. His acclaimed books, including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, Helgoland, and White Holes, have been number-one bestsellers around the world and translated into more than fifty languages. He has been included among the 100 most influential global thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine and among the world’s top fifty thinkers by Prospect magazine. Rovelli has worked in Italy, the United States, Canada, and France, and currently resides in Spain.