Illustration by Vartika Sharma

Carlo Rovelli, an Italian physicist, emeritus professor at the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille, has in the last 15 years or so established himself as a leading populariser of science. Although his specialist field, quantum gravity, is one of the most inaccessible areas of contemporary thought, he has reached an astonishingly wide audience through his public lectures, YouTube videos and popular books, several of which have become bestsellers. He writes well (“Physics has found its poet,” the novelist John Banville said of him), and brings to his discussions of abstruse theoretical physics references to an impressively broad range of writers and intellectuals, including philosophers (both western and eastern), historians, economists and political thinkers, as well as poets, writers and social critics.…