Carlo Rovelli, one of the world's foremost theoretical physicists, has written a book arguing that science's greatest error is not ignorance but the arrogance of certainty — the belief that rigorous method delivers final truths about reality. Drawing on Renaissance natural philosophy, Buddhist thought, and the lessons of quantum mechanics, he traces how humanity gradually mistook useful explanations for ultimate knowledge. His argument, born of lectures at Princeton and a lifetime at the frontier of physics, is not a retreat from science but an invitation to hold it more honestly: as a living,
Rovelli's 'Equality of All Things' challenges science's certainty myth
If there is nowhere to stand, we shall have to learn to fly.
Mark
So Rovelli is saying science doesn't actually discover truth? That seems to undercut the whole enterprise.
Mimi
Not quite. He's saying science works brilliantly at what it actually does—explain phenomena, make predictions, build technologies. But we've confused that success with having found ultimate reality.
Luke
But the source material doesn't really explain what he means by "ultimate reality" versus working knowledge. Is he saying Newton's laws aren't true, or just incomplete?
Mimi
Incomplete, I think. They work perfectly at our scale. The point is we've mistaken a useful model for the thing itself.
Mark
Where does the Eastern philosophy come in? Why does Nāgārjuna matter to a physicist?
Mimi
Rovelli seems to be arguing that Buddhist thought already understood what quantum mechanics is now forcing Western science to admit—that reality resists being pinned down in language.
Luke
The review doesn't actually quote Nāgārjuna or explain what Rovelli draws from him. We know he quotes the Buddhist teacher, but not what he says or why it's relevant.
Mark
Fair point. What about the practical stakes? Does Rovelli argue this humility about certainty changes how we should do science?
Mimi
He quotes Max Born saying the belief in absolute truth is the root of evil in the world. So yes—intellectual humility as a moral necessity, not just epistemology.
Luke
That's a big claim. The review attributes it to Born, not Rovelli, which is important. But it doesn't explain how Rovelli connects that to actual scientific practice or policy.
Mark
Is the book optimistic or pessimistic?
Mimi
Liberating, the reviewer says. Insouciant. It celebrates what we've done while accepting we'll never have final answers.
Luke
Which is a nice tone, but the review doesn't tell us whether Rovelli thinks this acceptance actually changes anything about how science gets funded, taught, or used.
The Pulse
- Rovelli, a physicist who has spent decades probing quantum gravity and the nature of time, now turns his formidable intellect against science's own foundational conceit — the pursuit of absolute certainty.
- The tension is real: most working scientists, and much of the public, believe science deals in settled truths, yet Rovelli shows this confidence is historically recent and philosophically fragile.
- He reaches across traditions — Wittgenstein, Heidegger, the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna — to argue that ambiguity in language is not science's weakness but the very engine of its progress.
- The stakes extend beyond academia: physicist Max Born's warning that belief in absolute certitude is 'the root cause of all evil in the world' frames the book as a quiet but urgent check on ideological extremism.
- Where the book lands is not in despair but in a kind of disciplined humility — if there is nowhere solid to stand, Rovelli writes, we shall have to learn to fly.
Carlo Rovelli, one of the world's foremost theoretical physicists, has written a book arguing that science's greatest error is not ignorance but the arrogance of certainty — the belief that rigorous method delivers final truths about reality. Drawing on Renaissance natural philosophy, Buddhist thought, and the lessons of quantum mechanics, he traces how humanity gradually mistook useful explanations for ultimate knowledge. His argument, born of lectures at Princeton and a lifetime at the frontier of physics, is not a retreat from science but an invitation to hold it more honestly: as a living, fallible, and therefore deeply human endeavour.
Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist known for his work on quantum gravity and the nature of time, has written his most ambitious book yet — one that argues science should abandon the pursuit of absolute certainty altogether. On the Equality of All Things, developed from lectures delivered at Princeton's philosophy department in late 2024, challenges a conviction so embedded in modern thought that most people barely notice they hold it: that science, unlike other human endeavours, delivers final truths.
Rovelli traces the misconception to a historical shift. Renaissance natural philosophers held a more modest ambition — they sought merely to 'save the phenomena,' to account for what they observed without claiming to know how things actually were. That deeper knowledge, they believed, belonged to God. The arrogance came later, with Newton, the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution. Newton's laws still work perfectly well at human scales, Rovelli notes, even though Einstein and quantum theory have revealed them to be incomplete. We live comfortably in a Newtonian world, eating at tables made of particles we do not fully understand.
To dismantle our hunger for certainty, Rovelli draws on an unusually wide range of thinkers — Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the second-century Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna — arguing that ambiguity in language is not a flaw to be corrected but essential to how science actually advances. He illustrates the danger of false certainty through the history of astronomy: for centuries, scholars insisted planets must orbit in perfect circles, leading Ptolemy into ever more elaborate epicycles. Only Kepler, after doubt and struggle, broke free to announce that planets move in ellipses — a claim so radical it might have cost him his life.
The book is not easy reading, but Rovelli writes with clarity and occasional poetic grace. His central claim is ultimately liberating: accepting uncertainty is not defeat but science's greatest gift to humanity — a bulwark against the ideological extremism that flourishes wherever people mistake their models for the mind of God. We are, he suggests, like figures cast out of Paradise, with the world all before us, still learning to walk in it.
Carlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist who has spent decades wrestling with quantum gravity and the nature of time itself, has written a book that amounts to a sustained argument against the very idea that science is in the business of finding truth. On the Equality of All Things, his most ambitious work, challenges a conviction so embedded in modern thought that most of us barely notice we hold it: that science, unlike other human endeavours, deals in certainties. Equations do not lie. Rigorous method produces rigorous answers. We know things.
Rovelli, now 70 and emeritus at the Centre of Physics Theory in Marseilles, is not some fringe skeptic. He has built a formidable career in theoretical physics, authored several influential books on quantum mechanics and cosmology, and holds positions at institutions in Canada and New Mexico. Yet in this book, written after delivering a series of lectures at Princeton University's philosophy department in late 2024, he makes a case that would have seemed heretical to the architects of the scientific revolution. He argues that we should abandon the goal of certainty altogether.
The misconception runs deep. Even many working scientists believe they are pursuing ultimate truths about reality's fundamental nature. But this is a relatively recent delusion. During the Renaissance, natural philosophers held a more modest ambition: they sought to "save the phenomena," to devise systems that would account for what they observed without claiming to know how things actually were. That knowledge, they believed, belonged to God. The shift came with Newton, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution—a gradual accumulation of human arrogance. Newton's laws still work perfectly well at the scale we inhabit, Rovelli notes, even though Einstein and quantum theory have revealed them to be incomplete. We live in a Newtonian world, eating at tables made of particles we do not fully understand, content enough with explanations that work.
But we are not truly content. We hunger for certainty, for what the poet Wallace Stevens called our "rage for order." Rovelli gently demolishes this hunger. Drawing on Western philosophy—Wittgenstein, Heidegger—and Eastern thought, particularly the second-century Buddhist teacher Nāgārjuna, he argues that ambiguity in language is not a flaw to be corrected but essential to how science actually advances. Niels Bohr recognized this when he noted that words like "reality" and "wave" are human constructs, and our task is to use them correctly—which does not mean unambiguously. The physicist Max Born, whom Rovelli credits as the true architect of quantum mechanics, put it starkly: the belief in absolute certitude and final truth is "the root cause of all evil in the world."
History bears this out. For centuries, astronomers held it as axiomatic that planets must orbit in perfect circles, because God could not abide imperfection. This false certainty led them into elaborate tangles. Ptolemy added epicycles upon epicycles to his model, circles within circles, trying to force observation into a predetermined shape. Even Copernicus, proposing a sun-centered system, clung to circular orbits. Only Kepler, after doubt and struggle, announced that planets move in ellipses—a claim so outrageous it might have cost him his life. Science advances not through the accumulation of certainties but through the slow, fitful, sometimes blind process of revising what we thought we knew.
Rovelli's book is not easy. It ventures into dense philosophical territory, quoting freely from pragmatists and Buddhist scholars alongside quantum theorists. But the labour pays dividends. He writes with clarity and occasional poetic grace, and his central claim is liberating: if there is nowhere solid to stand, we shall have to learn to fly. He notes that even thunderstorms are not yet completely understood, that knowing the world's fundamental equations does not mean knowing everything about the world. Physics, he insists, is overrated. The book celebrates human ingenuity—we built agriculture, we reached the moon—while turning a skeptical eye on our pretensions to lordship over the universe. We are like Adam and Eve cast out of Paradise, Rovelli writes, with the world all before us, still learning to walk in it.
Notable Quotes
Respectful of all philosophies, but a humble devotee of the so-called exact sciences, I find it wiser to abandon the goal of certainty altogether, in all aspects of knowledge.— Carlo Rovelli
The belief in a single truth and in being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in the world.— Max Born, quoted by Rovelli
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