Do space and time really exist?
What is reality made of?
Can we understand its deep structure?

Professor of theoretical physics Carlo Rovelli has spent his entire life exploring such questions. In this fascinating book, he shows us how our knowledge and perceptions of reality have changed over the centuries, from the time of Democritus to the modern era of loop quantum gravity. Leading us on a wondrous journey, he invites us to imagine an entirely new world where black holes are waiting to explode, spacetime is made up of infinitesimal grains, and infinity does not exist - to imagine a vast universe unknown and still unexplored.

"One night in 2012, during a long solitary drive from Italy to France, I realized that to explain the continuous modifications of the concepts of space and time in an understandable way, you have to start from the beginning: from Democritus and reach the quanta of space. After all, this is how I understand history. So I began to outline the entire book in my mind as I drove, and as time passed, I became more and more excited, until at some point I heard the siren of a police car and saw the officers signaling me to pull over - I had greatly exceeded the speed limit. The Italian police officers asked me, rather politely, if I had lost my mind and was driving at such speed. I explained to them that I had just found the idea I had been searching for so long. They let me go without giving me a ticket and wished me good luck with the book. This is what you are holding in your hands."