Carlo Rovelli Interviewed by Peter Frankopan

World-leading physicist and international bestselling writer Professor Carlo Rovelli talks about his favourite scientist, the little-known Greek philosopher Anaximander, who was the first to understand that the Earth was a rock suspended in space.

Anaximander and the Nature of Science was Rovelli’s first book and is only now being published in English translation. Rovelli says Anaximander laid the foundation of scientific thinking to the present day. He imagined an origin for the universe, the emergence of complex life from a single organism, rotation of planets and movement of animals from sea to land. Rovelli looks at the cultural landscape of the sixth century BCE that gave rise to such a shift in thinking and shows how Anaximander’s willingness to reimagine the world remains the bedrock of scientific thinking to this day.

Rovelli is author of two-million-selling Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality is Not What it Seems, The Order of Time and Helgoland, which have been translated into 43 languages. His fans include Antony Gormley, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, Nick Hornby and Morgan Freeman. Rovelli works at the Perimeter Institute and The Roman Institute in Canada and is also director of the quantum gravity research group of the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille, France. Here he talks to Professor Peter Frankopan, professor of global history at the University of Oxford and author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World.

This event is part of the festival’s programme of Italian literature and culture.