Masoud Golsorkhi  Your latest book brings Eastern and Western philosophy together with theoretical physics. What was the starting point?

Carlo Rovelli I decided I needed to come out of the woods and be honest; I am always hiding behind the mask of popular science. This book is about my contribution to the dialogue between physics and philosophy. A philosophy that disregards science is blind. Most philosophers working across different traditions know a little about modern science, but few have fully digested the impact of the 20th-century revolution in quantum physics. We must listen carefully to quantum mechanics and general relativity, and what they imply. In the opposite direction, I think science that is not aware of philosophical reflection on itself becomes sterile. Western philosophy and science have deeply influenced one another in their development, and I think they should continue to do so.

MG What attracted you to that idea of Western and ancient Chinese Taoist philosophy as a window onto the same scientific phenomena?

CR First of all, I’m a robber, a stealer. I’ve always been interested in philosophy. When I finished my undergraduate in physics, I enrolled in philosophy. Shortly after, they opened a PhD programme, but I had already got into graduate studies in physics. Recently, quantum mechanics has motivated me to explore philosophical ideas. People try to tame quantum mechanics by squeezing it into old metaphysical traditions, adding stuff to make it look more reasonable: hidden variables, the universal wave function. But if you really accept quantum mechanics as it is, a lot of the metaphysical foundations of our thinking are shattered. Quantum mechanics tells us that things don’t exist by themselves but in relations. I’ve been searching for a philosophical way of making sense of that, and there are wonderful intuitions in Western philosophy which help in that direction. A lot of my book is under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, maybe more so than ancient Taoism. But on this path, I first encountered the Madhyamaka Buddhist tradition. This was an extraordinary discovery for me; it’s a way of thinking that allows relationality to be taken as the main way of being. Then a few years ago, I read the Zhuangzi. It’s a fabulous text; it’s more than two millennia old, roughly from the time of Confucius.

Confucius is all about ethics, politics, how we live together. But I’m a scientist – I’m much more interested in the other Taoist part, which tells us how to think of the world. The Taoists think we are part of the overall flow of things; everything you view and judge, you do from within. Western philosophy from Plato onwards tries to take the individual out and describe the world from a distance. The great mythology of rationality is being outside of the world. We’re inside the world, so this leads to perspectivism, the idea that any description implicitly depends on who is giving the description. Then there is the other profoundly influential idea that every foundational question is ill-posed, so when you ask, how are things? What is the final story? The answer is: that’s a bad question. There’s no final story.

Relations are everything. When I talk about relations, I refer to two things. The message, which is the same as the Campbell Buddhist tradition, is not that you can think of the relation without the things; it’s that you cannot think about the things without the relation.

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The 2nd-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna argued for śūnyatā (“emptiness”): nothing has intrinsic, independent existence; things exist only in dependence on other things.

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MG Rumi says there is no lover, there is no beloved: the only thing that’s real is the love in between. Do you find any parallels with 19th-century energism – the idea that there is no matter, just energy?

CR There is a vague resonance. Energism came at a moment in the materialism of the 18th century, when the world was just a space with little stones moving around it. This immediately fell into the trap I’m trying to avoid, that there is this useful notion of energy for understanding the world. It’s not true that everything is energy. Energy is always a property of something else. And philosophically, I think that’s exactly the point. Let’s avoid falling on the last thing we have found interesting, and fall into the trap of thinking it’s the new foundation of reality.

Nowadays, we’re not in the 19th century world; we are in the 21st, the 22nd – the centuries go so fast. The foundation of the world is information: everything is information. We are just bits of information interacting. That’s another mistake humans make. When they discover a book, everything becomes a book you read. When they discover a machine, everything becomes a machine to read. Now we have invented computers, everything is a computer.

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When Niels Bohr was knighted in 1947 and had to design a coat of arms, he chose the Taoist taijitu (the yin-yang symbol) with the motto Contraria sunt complementa: “opposites are complementary.”

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MG Does relationism need a moral purpose?

CR I believe that all spheres of civilisation are not arbitrary constructions, but just what we humans do. We are part of nature. We are very good at talking, writing books and constructing legal and metaphysical systems. Morality doesn’t need to exist independently from us, or the argument of the philosopher. There is a subtle misunderstanding between things not being absolute and things being arbitrary. For a physicist, the distinction is clear. If I ask what the velocity of the moon is, there’s a velocity with respect to the Earth, a velocity with respect to the Sun, a velocity with respect to the galaxy. Velocity is a relative concept. The philosophers say that velocity is a relative concept, so the moon can do whatever it wants. No, it cannot do whatever it wants. There’s nothing arbitrary in the motion of the moon, and yet its motion is relative and not absolute. I believe the same goes for morality. For our generation in the West, many people considered certain things immoral 40 years ago, and they don’t anymore. I think morality is real, but it is relational and doesn’t stand by itself.

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Robert Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit to read the Gita in the original, and famously reached for its line “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” at the Trinity test.

MG I suppose being asked to commit to right and wrong happens because we live in a climate where facts are disputed. Your model refuses to substitute ignorance for other forms of certainty, which can in turn become traps.

CR Humans live neither in total ignorance nor in absolute certainty. I like to tell the story of my father, who grew up thinking his name was Franco, and when he went to the city office to get his papers for the first time, he learnt that his actual name was Giulio. When he was born, his mother – my grandmother – was a dominant Italian matriarch figure, and she imposed the name Franco. His father disagreed, and so he secretly registered the name he liked best, because he was afraid of his wife. So, my dad grew up being wrong about his own name. It’s always wiser to be open to the possibility we’re wrong, and to do things with sufficient, rather than total, certainty.

MG Does quantum theory draw any limits on the concept or project of science?

CR I would say quantum theory helped demolish an absurd mythology that science can tell us everything. If we think about what it would mean to have a complete knowledge of the world, we realise it’s completely silly. We don’t know what the weather will be like three weeks into the future. I don’t know the position of atoms inside a piece of wood. Most of the world is unreachable. The world is far more complicated than what the naive Enlightenment idea of understanding within computation told us.

The science we have today doesn’t look definitive in any way, even from the point of view of a physicist. The foundations of current physics are a mess. We are in a swamp. We don’t know the fundamental laws of the universe – but even if we did, they would be extraordinarily useless. I believe that my bicycle obeys the standard model of particle physics very diligently and precisely. There’s nothing that my bicycle does which does not follow the laws of the standard model; but suppose my bicycle breaks, do I take it to a particle physicist at CERN to fix? Obviously not. To fix a bike, you need the mechanic down the road who doesn’t know anything about protons, neutrons or quarks, but can actually just fix the bike. You cannot fix a bicycle using the Lagrangian function, and yet this does not mean that other descriptions of the world – whether through chemistry, psychology, geography, politics, literature – are in contradiction with one another. The great surprise of modern science is precisely the fact that every time we have looked for apparently completely different stories, they are compatible. The world is complicated; we have little grasp of it. And the dream of understanding everything is completely empty, in my opinion.

It’s much more likely that I’m a butterfly dreaming, or at least that seems more probable to me than being inside a simulation

MG Certain political and cultural movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, for example, seem to have generated very little structural change. Everybody feels that we live in tumultuous times, that there is rapid transformation, but without tangible movement. How do you understand the current situation, as someone who has insight into the nature of life in its broadest sense?

CR We tend to overestimate the rapidity in which things change. In science, things move much more slowly than what is reported. I get journalists asking me what happened in science last week. I say, obviously nothing. Just ask me about what happened in the last 100 years. It’s very hard to see what is happening when things are happening, and there’s a lot of noise about this and that. The end of the Cold War was a big change politically; the world had to re-arrange the way it was thinking about itself. Nowadays, of course, things are happening historically, but I’m not sure people have full clarity about the different narratives at hand. What you read in the newspaper is not necessarily history in the making. Sometimes you don’t see things coming, and sometimes you overestimate the changes. People now are extraordinarily excited for LLMs and AI development.

MG It seems to me that nobody in the field of AI truly understands how the technology works. Is there a parallel between neural networks and quantum mechanics? Can information theory help us understand unpredictability?

CR Two things have information about one another. By looking at one, you can learn something about the other. A rock has information about what happened 100,000 years ago; two people will have information about one another. A moon crater has information about a stone falling on Earth. In quantum mechanics you talk about what an apparatus measures about the system, which is a way for an apparatus to have information about the system, so you can rephrase everything in informational terms. I think the more we know how to use it, the more useful tools we’ll have for thinking about the world. We’re giving trillions to Jeff Bezos and a few other people in exchange for the promise of all the incredible things that this computer is going to do. Trillions certainly are going to be interesting. In just a few years we’re beginning to learn how good LLMs are, and we’re also beginning to learn how rubbish they are. We haven’t yet figured out the extent to which the rubbish can be cured. What I’m even more sceptical about is quantum computers.

Carlo Rovelli, On the Equality of All Things (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

MG Do you believe in quantum computing?

CR I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of talk, but at the end of the day, scientists haven’t got past encoding in a way that makes it more efficient. You can design a problem where a quantum computer can do it a million or however many times better, but if you can’t encode the problem and then decode it in a useful way, what’s the point? The power is scary, though, especially when you talk about cryptography and everything that really will change the way the internet works.

MG Do you question reality itself?

CR Yes, I do. A lot of people ask me what I think about the simulation hypothesis. Could the older reality we see around us be a simulation? It’s much more likely that I’m a butterfly dreaming, or at least that seems more probable to me than being inside a simulation. Everything is possible. There’s no way out of this circle; there’s no way out of our dreaming of being dreamt. .