The director reflects on the physicist’s new book White Holes, published by Adelphi
Reading White holes by Carlo Rovelli, as fantastic as the previous ones, I am introduced to a science that I really like e It always makes me envy those who have studied physics since they were young. Not like me who chose ancient letters! Yet as a little girl I liked to look at the night sky with the stars and look for the figures I had seen in an astronomical atlas. I liked knowing that the sky is not a big flat sheet up there but a large space.
I used to go dancing on Saturday afternoons up at the Castle of Carpi with a friend who was studying Physics and once he spoke to me, I remember, about «cosmic rays». If I had understood correctly, they are radiations of various kinds such as light and sound and I thought it was a normal phenomenon, that it happened as sweat was normal when dancing fast. To say another, when I made the film for Rai Galileo in 1968 (never broadcast and transferred to Cineriz and passed to Mediaset) I found it very interesting how Galileo invented the telescope: a friend of his who came from Holland brought him a telescope as a gift which was sold there as a novelty, a nice object to aim it at — so to speak — at the girls who pass a little far away or at the theatre. Galileo instead disassembles it and decides to make one a little bigger and with more powerful lenses and aims it not at the garden in front of the house but at the Moon! On the Sun! Etc… Sees or confirms phenomena never seen with the naked eye. He will later write the Dialogue on top systems where he specifies that it is not the Sun that revolves around the Earth as the Bible says but it is the Earth that revolves around the Sun.
A huge discovery! For science, that was no mean statement! However, the book was immediately put on the Index because the thesis was contrary to what was written in the Bible and Galileo had to deny his discovery and the text in order not to be burned at the stake… And, by the way: the film I made on Galileo for Rai in 1968 now it could be transmitted because thanks to Pope Wojtyla Galileo’s essay was removed from the Index in 1996!
After these (somewhat narcissistic) notes, I would like to announce that from the book by Carlo Rovelli The order of time I made a film (still in progress): it gave me great happiness to be able to make it. It is as if I could freely express the pleasure of communicating how our life is continuously connected with the whole universe: planets, stars, galaxies, worlds, black and white holes, etc… And also to understand that we humans, although different from each other, have bonds between us that began who knows when because “time”, the one marked from watches, it’s not only a useful invention to be punctual for appointments, but something a little disturbing especially because you can’t stop it according to your pleasure. Time can also give anxiety, obviously, because you can’t stop it, it can be a friend or not.
I think that at the time not even Sigmund Freud, an excellent psychoanalyst, was able to speak easily, even though he had a couch specially made to do it comfortably. Carlo Rovelli however with his texts he introduces us with a feeling of enthusiasm to his investigations into the universe and time (two still so mysterious idols!) and makes us take small steps towards getting to know them (it’s also a journey!) where the first thing to know is that everything in the universe is in motion and the second is that there is no limit, a border… references to which we have been accustomed since we were children… Infinity is not imaginable, it’s a word for poems like love
infinite… Reading Rovelli, in short, means taking a journey into “astonishment” and makes you think that if by chance you are born again and go to university you will enroll in Physics!
March 21, 2023 (change March 21, 2023 | 21:37)
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