Carlo Rovelli ON THE EQUALITY OF ALL THINGS with Iain McGilchrist

On the Equality of All Things

What do we really know about the world? Acclaimed physicist Carlo Rovelli guides us through the speculative depths of modern physics to explore what our knowledge tells us about the strangeness of reality. Be unafraid to test its limits and prepare to lose your moorings, as he suggests there may be no final foundation to life. We live in a universe where electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies are notions that illuminate each other, and reality is better understood as a set of reflections, revealing the equality of all things.

Recalling the ancient story of the philosopher who dreamt that he was a butterfly and, on waking, wonders if it wasn’t the butterfly who had dreamt it was the philosopher, Rovelli invites us to recognise that our knowledge is coherent but also uncertain and circular. There may be no foundations, no hierarchies, but we, who are woven together by thoughts and desires, emotions and dreams, are at one with all things in the world. We are, in a deep sense, at home.

Carlo Rovelli

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist who has made significant contributions to quantum theory and the physics of space and time. He directs a Quantum Gravity research group in Marseille, France. He is an internationally acclaimed writer, whose 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 over forty languages, rendering the insights of contemporary physics accessible to wide audiences.

Dr Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, London, a former research Fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Baltimore, and a former Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch.

He is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise – the culture which helps to mould, and in turn is moulded by, our minds and brains.

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