A love song to quantum physics and its deepest mysteries
The apparent subject of this new book by Italian physicist and popularizer Carlo Rovelli (Verona, 1956) is white holes, in principle purely mathematical objects that would be the counterpart of black holes and, instead of swallowing matter, like black holes, would expel it. Black holes were also born that way, so abstract that until about twenty years ago no one had seen them and they were merely the result of equations. But since then, evidence has trickled down, and there are even photographs of the horizon of black holes, if not of their inner vortex. White holes, on the other hand, are still subject to debate about their exact nature; in theory, they are like black holes, but with time reversed.
However, Rovelli's talent allows for other barely hidden topics in White Holes: Inside the Horizon : how to do outreach; what is the essence of being a scientist, its costs and its rewards; how to talk about Dante Alighieri, to let himself be guided by him, amidst the darkest mysteries of the universe. To talk about the most complex physics, to talk about the simplest humanity. All in just over a hundred pages.
This isn't the first time Rovelli has achieved synthesis: science, poetry, humanity, and mystery. In fact, his leap to international stardom from the unexpected pages of the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore came with his incomparable Seven Brief Lessons in Physics , a 2014 work written for "those unfamiliar with modern science or with little knowledge of it," in which he summarized a hundred years of research in a single small volume. This work achieved extraordinary success: translations into dozens of languages and entry into best-seller lists with more than a million copies sold.
A decade later, with White Holes , however, Rovelli takes a risk he hadn't taken before (not even in the previous Helgoland , from 2022): telling a story of highly technical subject matter in which he is, at the same time, involved as a frontier researcher. It's the story of an ongoing adventure. Together with Hal Haggard (both from the University of Aix-Marseille, France), Rovelli published in 2015 the scientific paper in which the two scientists proposed that white holes originate from black holes through a certain rebound effect. The book retraces that story of the discovery with Hal at a university blackboard, the pleasure felt in the body at the discovery, the narration of how it was reached and what could happen in the future if it were confirmed. And he does so by omitting details for the two types of readers he has in mind: those who know everything about physics and those who know nothing: "For both, I'll get to the point: those who know nothing about physics are, I suppose, interested only in the essentials; details are a useless burden. Those who know the details probably won't want to have them repeated."
For this, Einstein's equations are a good guide—much like the Latin poet Virgil, "your guide, your lord, and your master"—because all of the German physicist's predictions have been verified over the past hundred years, even the most unexpected and contrary to common sense. At some point, however, a discontinuity in space-time can occur: natural events, Rovelli argues, are not always imaginable as immersed in space and time.
In this back-and-forth between theory, history, and what happens to the author (as a researcher and as a writer who accounts for what happens to his research self), Rovelli then explains why he, more than anyone else, finds white holes interesting. In the middle of an ahistorical third person, he jumps in and says that he has spent “my life trying to understand precisely the quantum aspects of space and time (...) That is my great love.” “I know the signs of the ancient flame. At the bottom of the black hole, I see it flickering,” he adds. This narrative strategy—with tiny Saramago-esque touches included—recurs in a loop: “I reread these lines for the umpteenth revision. I am in Verona, in the square that bears the poet's name. Before me, his austere statue. I am sitting on the steps of the loggia of Fra Giocondo. Here I first saw my first love.”
White Holes , it must be said, does not dispense with the most complex physics, leaving the reader free, with the author's permission, to skip pages where the physical technique forgets the need for the narrative to flow. Thus, details pass over Einsteinian ideas, his equations, and the singular zone where they might cease to function (hence the discontinuity); Stephen Hawking's contributions to the nature of things that could emerge from black holes; the fierce debate among current physicists about the amount of information contained in black holes; and loop quantum gravity.
The book ends with reflections on the meaning of life according to an elderly Sioux, which is both a way of “addressing with a song all the things we encounter” and the typical appeal of scientists regarding the implications of their theory: in this case, the resolution of one of the great mysteries of current physics, such as the nature of dark matter, which could “be made up of millions and millions of these small and delicate white holes, which reverse the time of black holes, but not too much, and float lightly in the universe, like dragonflies.”
White holes
By Carlo Rovelli
Anagram. Translated by Pilar González Rodríguez
135 pages, $27,500
Seven short lessons in physics
By Carlo Rovelli
Anagram. Trans.: F. Ramos Mena
97 pages, $17,000
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