It’s not given to many of us to work at the bleeding edge of theoretical physics, discovering for ourselves the way the world really works. The nearest most of us will get is the pop-science shelf and these have been dominated for quite a while by the lyrical outpourings of Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. Rovelli’s upcoming one, Helgoland, promises to have his reader tearing across a universe made, not of particles, but of the relations between them.
It’s all too late, however: Frank Wilczek’s Fundamentals has gazumped Rovelli handsomely, with a vision that replaces our classical idea of physical creation — “atoms and the void” — with one consisting entirely of spacetime, self-propagating fields and properties.
Born in 1951 and awarded the Nobel
