On the Equality of All Things

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

Spectator

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

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

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

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

Prospect

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

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

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

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

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

Probably his best book yet

Popular Science

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

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

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

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

Bryan Appleyard, Englesberg Ideas

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