Born 1956 in Verona. A physicist who came of age politically in the 1970s — part of Italy's counterculture, with a police file to show for it — before settling into the most abstract problem he could find: what space and time actually are.
He is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity, an approach that tries to quantise gravity itself, and has spent decades working between Italy, the US, and France at the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille.
His Seven Brief Lessons on Physics began as a series of newspaper columns for an Italian weekend paper. Translated into more than forty languages, it sold over a million copies — proof that people still want to read about the universe when it is written beautifully.
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
The most beautiful introduction to modern physics ever written. 79 pages. Read it in an afternoon.
The Order of Time
A physicist's meditation on why time flows, what cycles mean, and whether the present exists at all.
Reality Is Not What It Seems
A loop-quantum-gravity physicist explains what physics has actually concluded about space, time, and matter. Rovelli writes like a man who has met the universe and is reporting back in plain Italian. The clearest entry to where physics is honestly standing today.