2
" Dirac's quantum mechanics thus allows us to do two things. First, to calculate which values a physical variable may assume. This is called "calculation of the spectrum of a variable"; it captures the granular nature of things. When an object (atom, electromagnetic field, molecule, pendulum, stone, star, and the like) interacts with something else, the values computed are those that its variables can assume in the interaction (relationism). The second thing that Dirac's quantum mechanics allows us to do is to compute the probability that this or that value of a variable appears at next interaction. This is called "calculation of an amplitude of transition." Probability expresses the third feature of the theory: indeterminacy, the fact that it does not give unique predictions, only probabilistic ones.
This is Dirac's quantum mechanics: a recipe for calculating the probability that one or another value in the spectrum appears during an interaction. That's it. What happens between one interaction and the next is not mentioned in the theory. It does not exist. "
― Carlo Rovelli , Quantum Gravity
9
" But Einstein realizes that energy and mass are two facets of the same entity, just as the electric and magnetic fields are two facets of the same field, and as space and time are two facets of the one thing, spacetime. This implies that mass, by itself, is not conserved; and energy-as it was conceived at the time-is not independently conserved, either. One may be transformed into the other: only one single law of conservation exists, not two. What is conserved is the sum of mass and energy, not each separately. Processes must exist that transform energy into mass, or mass into energy. "
― Carlo Rovelli , Quantum Gravity
11
" Scientific thinking explores and redraws the world, gradually offering us better and better images of it, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change. The world is boundless and iridescent; we want to go and see it. We are immersed in its mystery and in its beauty, and over the horizon there is unexplored territory. The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don't know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious. "
― Carlo Rovelli , Quantum Gravity