The mosaic ceiling of the Baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence, in a composite image created by Matthias Kabel in 2011 \u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then, quite unexpectedly \u2014 even though he is<\/em> an Italian<\/em> physicist \u2014 Rovelli immediately proposes that the illustrious Dante Alighieri, Italy\u2019s greatest poet, had already intuited a 3-sphere cosmos in the Paradiso<\/em>, the third volume of his early fourteenth-century Divina Commedia<\/em>. \u00a0And I must say that Rovelli makes a case for it. \u00a0(The idea isn\u2019t original with Rovelli; he credits its initial \u201cdiscovery\u201d to an American mathematician by the name of Mark Peterson, in 1979.) \u00a0He connects it, too, to the interior design of the famous octagonal Baptistry of San Giovanni in Florence, which stands directly in front of the city\u2019s remarkable Duomo or Cathedral.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rovelli plainly admires Einstein enormously. \u00a0But he has just previously been explaining that Einstein\u2019s mathematical abilities were not the great physicist\u2019s strength. \u00a0Rather, what made Einstein amazingly unique was the power of his imagination. \u00a0It\u2019s interesting, in that light, to see Rovelli go on to link artistic inspiration or intuition with that in the sciences, and to use aesthetic language to appreciate the insights of both a great physicist and\u00a0a great poet:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know if the young Einstein had encountered the Paradiso<\/em> during his intellectual wanderings in Italy, and whether or not the vivid imagination of the Italian poet may have had a direct influence on his intuition that the universe might be both finite and without boundary. \u00a0Whether or not such influence occurred, I believe that this example demonstrates how great science and great poetry are both visionary, and may even arrive at the same intuitions. \u00a0Our culture is foolish to keep science and poetry separated: they are two tools to open our eyes to the complexity and beauty of the world.<\/span><\/p>\nDante\u2019s 3-sphere is only an intuition within a dream. \u00a0Einstein\u2019s 3-sphere has mathematical form and follows from the theory\u2019s equations. \u00a0The effect of each is different. \u00a0Dante moves us deeply, touching the sources of our emotions. \u00a0Einstein opens a road towards the unsolved mysteries of our universe. \u00a0But both count among the most beautiful and significant flights that the mind can achieve. \u00a0(88)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 In a remarkable section (pages 77-88) of Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (Penguin, 2017), Rovelli, a prominent Italian theoretical physicist who currently directs the quantum gravity research group at the Centre de physique th\u00e9orique in Marseilles, France, sets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11549,11573,10552,10219,11567,11561,11555,11552,440,11564,4841,132,11579,10543,11582,644,4786,11570,2195,2812,10216,11576,243,11558],"class_list":["post-85123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-3-sphere","tag-baptistry","tag-carlo","tag-carlo-rovelli","tag-comedy","tag-commedia","tag-curvature","tag-curved","tag-dante","tag-divina","tag-divine","tag-einstein","tag-florence","tag-imagination","tag-intuition","tag-literature","tag-paradise","tag-paradiso","tag-physics","tag-poetry","tag-rovelli","tag-san-giovanni","tag-science","tag-space-time"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Dante](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2020\/05\/Dante_Domenico_di_Michelino_Duomo_Florence.jpg\")
<\/a>