Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time
Some tangential thoughts: even though I like these popular science (physics, to be precise) books, I have hard times to imagine their writers as a <i>real scientists</i>. Tyson, Greene, Carroll, Kaku, Rovelli... So many writers author so many books about these <i>hey-look!-so-fascinating!</i> things. It looks like a bandwagon and more and more scientists (yes, physicists especially) are getting on it - like they don&#x27;t have any important research to do, like they are so hopeless and desperate about the current state of physics and they stopped caring about it and found a <i>proxy</i> to monetize their knowledge. But hey, that&#x27;s not a secret anymore - everyone knows about the crisis, from the Queen of England to the hounds of hell. Sabine Hossenfelder is a legend for me. A few years back, when I was taking a Physics101 class, even the lecturer almost begged for help after the last lecture at the end of the semester: &quot;my fellow students, please, please, consider (to continue your career in the field of) physics. Physics is stuck. It needs new ideas, new theories, new minds. Please consider this.&quot; I was stunned. That was some real thing. 
I guess the fast advancement of technology in the late ~100 years made even the most brilliant minds (relatively) lazy. They gradually stopped thinking, beating their brains out year after year and here we are. No serious discovery after the quantum theory. String theory? Yeah, gazillions of dimensions - good luck with that. Higgs boson, Gravitational waves? Come on, nothing revolutionary - we&#x27;re still waiting for the revolution to emerge from (upgraded!) LHC. For me, they are cleverly and beautifully marketed (minor) findings. (Maybe some of you have heard of, some (if not many) of the top universities have teams working hard doing all the &quot;scientific-marketing&quot; for the Nobel Prize - it&#x27;s a precious prestige win in this <i>popular</i> world we live in).<p>Minds get eroded by technology by heavily relying on it. And it&#x27;s getting worse and worse by the distraction caused by all the digital &quot;life&quot; surrounding us, pulling and tightening its ropes every day. I imagine a true scientist as a monk. S&#x2F;he doesn&#x27;t think about writing a pop-sci book, appearing on TV and s&#x2F;he got a distantiation even for interviews about her&#x2F;his latest important research&#x2F;discovery. &quot;Monks&quot; are needed more than ever for science nowadays.<p>Those were my humble 2 cents.