Review of "There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness" by Carlo Rovelli

Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist and writer. I've enjoyed two of Rovelli's popular books about physics and was curious about 'There Are Places In The World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness.' The book demonstrates Rovelli's wide-ranging interests and breadth of knowledge and is interesting to read.


Carlo Rovelli

Rovelli fits the definition of a Renaissance Man in that he tries to embrace all knowledge and develop his own capacities as fully as possible. In this compendium of essays that were previously published in various newspapers, Rovelli writes about poets, scientists, and philosophers who have influenced him in some way. He also touches on his travels, black holes, religion, atheism, statistics, octopus nervous systems, inequality in society, Mein Kampf, free will, and much more.

Rovelli has studied the texts of historical figures like Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, Dante, Plato, Isocrates, Newton, etc.....as well as modern scientists and mathematicians like Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Karl Popper, Roger Penrose and more. Rovelli likes to 'connect the dots' between ancient and modern knowledge and to muse about diverse subjects that catch his interest.


Great Scientists

To provide a feel for the essays, I'll give some examples.

ღ Lolita and the Blue Icarus
Most people probably associate Vladimir Nabokov with his novels, especially 'Lolita.' But butterflies - such as the Blue Icarus - were Nabokov's passion. He collected butterflies as a child, published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species, and was the curator of the Lepidoptera section in the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology. The writer was also fascinated by insect mimicry, and wrote, "When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp...it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish manner" and "When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in."


Vladimir Nabokov with his butterfly net


Blue Icarus Butterfly


This moth mimics a wasp to avoid predators


This butterfly mimics a leaf to avoid predators

ღ Dante, Einstein, and the Three-Sphere
In Dante's epic poem The Divine Comedy, completed in 1321, he depicts the universe (in more lyrical terms) as two sets of concentric spheres, each of which encloses the other. Rovelli observes that Dante is describing a 'three-sphere', the shape of the universe Einstein hypothesized in 1917. The physicist observes, "Dante's unbridled poetic imagination and extraordinary intelligence anticipated by centuries a brilliant intuition of Einstein's."


Dante Alighieri

A three-sphere is a 4-dimensional mathematical construct that's hard to picture. However, Rovelli notes that in a three-sphere universe, a very fast spaceship always moving in the same direction would eventually end up back where it started from. So.....not an infinite universe.



ღ Why Does Inequality Exist?
Most societies have great disparities: billionaires and the poor; generals and privates; freemen and slaves; etc. How did this come to be?

Research suggests that members of nomadic hunter-gatherer groups, which consisted of 10 to 20 individuals, were socially equal. There were no leaders and no accumulation of wealth because booty from the hunt, which spoiled quickly, had to be distributed right away.


Hunter-Gatherers

But when farming began, and extended stationary clans developed, social distinctions emerged. "The conspicuous success of certain individuals began to be socially recognized....and men began to assign higher value to their own gender." 😣 In time, the clan came to be run by a minority that controlled its rites, and this was the origin of the aristocracy, of the clergy, and of large concentrations of wealth. Inequality in human society was born.


Early Farming Community

ღ Marie Curie
Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences (physics and chemistry) while struggling against adverse circumstances - because she was a woman in a world where it was often assumed women were inferior to men, and because she was a migrant from Poland to France.


Marie Curie

One of Curie's major practical achievements was the realization that X-rays could have medical applications. Marie constructed the first mobile radiography units, and used them on soldiers during WWI. It's estimated that a million servicemen were treated with the benefit of X-rays, saving thousands of lives.


Marie Curie's X-Ray Machine

ღ Black Holes I: The Fatal Attraction of Stars
At one time black holes were considered to be theoretical phenomena that didn't really exist. Then in 1972, a compact dark object in the Cygnus constellation, called Cygnus X-1, was seen to have another star rotating around it at great speed. Physicist John Wheeler wrote: "A black hole is like a man dressed in black who waltzes in a barely lit room with a woman dressed in white. We know that it is there only because we can see a bright star whirling around it."

Now it is estimated that in our galaxy alone there are tens of millions of black holes similar to Cygnus X-1.


Black Hole

ღ Black Holes II: The Heat of Nothingness
Stephen Hawking demonstrated that black holes are naturally hot. This surprised scientists, who once thought nothing could escape a black hole, So how could a black hole give off heat? The heat of black holes involves both the theory of general relativity and quantum theory. This is a scientific breakthrough because it's an indication of a way to combine these two great (seemingly unmergeable) physics theories. In quantum terms, Rovelli speculates that the heat of black holes may be the clue that reveals the existence of 'molecules of space' whose vibrations create heat.


Stephen Hawking determined that black holes emit heat

ღ Black Holes III: The Mystery of the Center
We don't know what happens when matter falls into the center of a black hole. The research group Rovelli works with in Marseille, together with other physicists, are exploring the idea that matter slows down and stops before it reaches the center of a black hole; it forms a kind of extremely small, dense star, a Planck star. Then the matter rebounds and forms a white hole....a region of space into which nothing can enter, but from which things emerge. Why don't we see the explosion immediately? Because time does not pass at the same speed everywhere; it's slowed down by gravity. So if you're INSIDE the black hole, the explosion occurs quickly. But if you're OUTSIDE the black hole, the explosion takes millions of years. (Pretty weird, right?)


Rovelli and other physicists speculate that matter at the center of a black hole might explode back out

ღ Churchill and Science
Winston Churchill was the first British prime minister to appoint a scientific advisor. He followed scientific advances with interest and wrote articles on popular science. Churchill even speculated about the possibility that life may exist elsewhere in the universe, observing: "With thousands of millions of nebulae, each one containing hundreds of millions of suns, the probability that there is an immense number containing planets where life is possible is high."

Churchill was also rather skeptical about humanity and wrote: "I am not so impressed by the successes of our civilization as to believe that in this immense universe....we may [not] be the highest level of mental or physical development that has been reached in this vast expanse of space and time." (I agree.)


Winston Churchill



There's much more in the book, and the essay format makes it especially good for dipping into between other life activities. Highly recommended.

Rating: 4 stars