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On the Equality of All Things
  • Published: 15 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241733707
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

On the Equality of All Things

Physics and Philosophy

Formats & editions
Hardback
15 Sept 2026
EBook
10 Sept 2026
Audiobook
10 Sept 2026
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‘The poet of physics’ returns with a dazzling exploration of our place in the universe

What can we really know about the world around us? Or is there beauty in daring not to know?

With clarity and lightness, acclaimed physicist Carlo Rovelli takes us on a journey of enlightenment, to the speculative frontiers of modern physics and the boundaries of thought. There is no fear in testing their limits, he suggests – not least because there may be no final ground to reach.

Here Rovelli shows us that electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies are not essentially different in nature from one another, but rather ideas that illuminate each other. Reality, he reveals, is shaped by a continuous play of reflections. From this emerges his visionary insight: the equality of all things.

Like the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who dreams he is a butterfly and wakes unsure whether he is Zhuangzi dreaming to be a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming to be Zhuangzi, Rovelli invites us to see reality anew, recognizing that our knowledge is coherent but also uncertain and circular. We are made of the same stuff as the rest of reality – and so we are, in a deep sense, home in the world.
  • Published: 15 September 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241733707
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $45.00
Categories:

About the author

Carlo Rovelli

Carlo Rovelli is an internationally acclaimed writer whose books, including Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, Helgoland and White Holes, have been number one bestsellers around the world and translated into over forty languages. As a theoretical physicist, he has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time and he is currently directing the quantum gravity research group of the Centre de physique théorique in Marseille, France.
portrait photo of Carlo Rovelli

Also by Carlo Rovelli

85 Seconds to Midnight
The Order of Time
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness
White Holes
Anaximander
Helgoland
See all

Praise for On the Equality of All Things

Carlo Rovelli is the best thinker out there articulating physics, philosophy, and literature. There simply are no scientists of his caliber who also are humanists of the first order. His prose has the enviable ability to expand the realm of the utterable and, with it, the reach of our intellectual experience

Hernan Diaz, author of Trust

Time and again during the reading of On the Equality of All Things, I found myself physically thrilled by Carlo Rovelli's overarching ideas: that certainty in science is an illusion, that science will never manage to reveal the ultimate truths of the natural world, that there is no nobler cause on this earth than trying

Philip Marsden, author of Rising Ground

A broad-ranging virtuoso ... "Interesting" barely touches the sides with Rovelli

The best new popular science books of September 2026, New Scientist

Rovelli can be counted on for a brain-melting moment or two ... This slim treatise modestly seeks to recalibrate many of our foundational assumptions about the nature of reality and our relationship to it

NPR

A serene tour of the philosophy Rovelli has drawn from a lifetime in physics

Prospect

Rovelli describes the world – with typical flirtatiousness – as a place made up of kisses. Things constantly happening in relation to one another, never simply singular things being … Even when you haven’t understood what he’s said, his books somehow convince you otherwise

Observer

A treatise that feels entirely liberating and brings its readers closer to the world around them. The poetic streak Rovelli is celebrated for is fully apparent through its pages, simultaneously enriching and contextualising the complex scientific ideas contained within

AnOther

Impressively broad … I found his insistence on relationships, his allergy to absolutes and his humility about how often experience teaches us to change our scientific minds compelling

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, New Scientist

Suffused with genius ... Rovelli is a formidable thinker and a ferocious researcher

Bryan Appleyard, Englesberg Ideas

Studded with gems of poetic insight … the reader is amply rewarded by the excitement of the venture, by the richness of the lessons we are offered, and by moments of pure aesthetic bliss … a marvellous, insouciant and liberating book

John Banville, Irish Times

He is such a good writer he gives the mathematically challenged the feeling of understanding how things are and a sense of why

Nigel Warburton, The New World

Probably his best book yet

Popular Science

One of the key themes of this work is the acceptance of different perspectives ... That approach may yet help to steer humanity clear of the next threatened catastrophe

The i Paper

On the Equality of All Things, a lapidary amalgam of philosophy and physics, is an altogether charming book

Spectator

A physicist’s guide to life, the universe and everything... Rovelli lays out the philosophical significance of what he believes is a major scientific revolution, happening right now... he invites us to stop thinking about the world as something we stand without and instead take our rightful place within it

Farrah Jarral, Guardian