In clear, elegant prose, Rovelli guides the reader through a whirlwind tour of some of the biggest ideas in physics. His passion for his chosen field is evident on every page ... Seven Brief Lessons has a deeper philosophical bent — it’s a rare science book that cites Lucretius — and should appeal to readers with a similar sensibility. One can easily imagine perusing these essays while comfortably ensconced in an overstuffed chair by the fire, a snifter of cognac in hand.
These are complex ideas, but Mr. Rovelli’s avowed mission is to convey the beauty of modern physics, if not its convoluted underbelly. Given the book’s brevity, peripheral topics whoosh by like signposts along a superhighway ... Reading praiseworthy books like [this], I find myself at once exhilarated by the indomitable spirit that propels our exploration of nature and oppressed by the countervailing backdrop of global disharmony.
The essays in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics arrive like shots of espresso, which you can consume the way the Italians do, quickly and while standing up. As slim as a volume of poetry, Mr. Rovelli’s book also has that tantalizing quality that good books of poems have; it artfully hints at meanings beyond its immediate scope ... Mr. Rovelli imparts a sense that we may have begun to wave farewell, and his book is a roll call of the scientists who have taken us so far, from Einstein and Niels Bohr through Werner Heisenberg and Stephen Hawking. Like us and everything else in our universe, they emerged from one small, dense hot cloud. These men’s intellects simply burned a bit brighter. The lessons in Mr. Rovelli’s book, as elegiac as they are incisive, do them justice.
Seven Brief Lessons does not shy away from philosophy and it is an admirable testament, I think, to the fact that philosophy and natural science, although perhaps never one and the same, must grapple with each other. None of Rovelli's 'lessons' left me satisfied. But in a good way. They all left me wanting more ... Rovelli's is a beautiful book and I recommend it. But I warn the reader, and I warn him: If he is right that we belong to the very same nature it is the project of physics to understand, then it may be that there is something incomplete or not yet adequate in our physics itself. For we have nothing like an adequate account of ourselves in the natural world.
There is the nagging sense that a book like this is meant to hook people normally terrified by 'weighty' scientific thought — a kind of 'Physics for Dummies,' which you can read in 45 minutes — and to get parents to plunk down the cash so that precocious Susie, as she heads into next year’s AP classes, can be one further up still. Feels like a quick-draw marketing move to me, and reads like one as well, in that you can read this book once, and there’s not much more to get from it.
...a spare, poetic, and thoughtful look at the major revolutions in the field ... What sets it apart is both its breadth and concision: over a hundred years of scientific innovation surveyed in fewer than 90 pages. Rovelli often describes the science in beautifully clear lay terms ... But elsewhere there is simply not enough on the page for a lay reader to grasp the physics ... Seven Brief Lessons is, in other words, an uncluttered book with perhaps a little too much breathing room. The reader is presented the science, but doesn’t always have an opportunity to participate in its unfolding ... To be sure, Rovelli’s poetic and markedly untechnical language is engaging, and, in this way, the book succeeds. But, at the same time, the flagrant omissions, both historical and scientific, erect a barrier between the world of the scientist and that of the reader.
The chapters are manageable chunks of famous theories, most recognizable even to those of us who don’t happen to have a Ph.D. Mr. Rovelli hits full stride in the fifth lesson, where he deals with loop quantum gravity theory — his area of expertise ... If you’re on the fence about reading this book, skip to the fourth or fifth lessons ... The book has three main ingredients: science, history and sentimentality. I prefer the first two, but the third does an acceptable job of tying the seven lessons together.
