Books: On Our Place In The World

There are two new books that examine our place in the world, through the prism of our perspectives on it: On the Equality of All Things: Lessons on Physics and Philosophy, by Carlo Rovelli, and A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint, by Wendy S. Walters.

On the Equality of All Things: Lessons on Physics and Philosophy

By Carlo Rovelli

Scribner; hardcover, 192 pages; $27.00

Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist has made significant contributions to the physics of space and time. His acclaimed books include Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, Helgoland, and White Holes, have been number-one bestsellers globally and have been transplanted into over fifty languages. Foreign Policy magazine put him among their top 100 most influential global thinkers, and Prospect has him as one their top 50 thinkers.

In the new book, On the Equality of All Things: Lessons on Physics and Philosophy, Rovelli presents a radical new vision of reality, mapping out a watershed moment in both physics and philosophy.

We are living in an age of scientific advancement that is rivaling Copenicus, Galileo, and Newton, one of discovery that has revolutionized our understanding of the world that it has shaken our most basic assumptions about who we are and our relationship to all things in our world.

Rovelli turns his attention to this reckoning, bringing his expertise and clarity to both the most mind-bending theories of modern physics and the most fundamental questions imaginable about the nature of time and existence. He takes the reader into this universe we thought we knew, but it is not made of things, but relationships. Along with that is the idea that knowledge will be imperfect, impermament, and incomplete.

"It is a world not made of objects, not occupying space, not unfolding in a single time, not governed by causes and effects," writes Rovelli. "It is woven by relations; made up of intertwining perspectives - which can only be described from within. This view invites us to modify the concepts we are accustomed to using when organizing reality, to abandon certainties, and to give up on the idea of an ultimate foundation. Entering this uncertain world - first as a student, then as a researcher, reflecting on it and discussing it at length - has been, and still is, a vertiginous source of amazement."

This book is presented as a series of six lessons, starting with The Relational Structure of Reality, then ranging from Spacetime is a Quantum Process, and Without Certainty or Foundation.

This thought-inspiring book is an awe-inspiring meditation on science, meaning, and being that charts the strange majesty of the world we have always lived in, delivered a thinker who isn't afraid to challenge not only centuries of philosophers, but our current era's intuitions about the nature of reality and what organizes it.

A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint

By Wendy S. Walters

Scribner; hardcover, 352 pages; $30.00

Wendy S. Walters is an associate professor of nonfiction in the Writing Program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She is the author of Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal and Troy, Michigan. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, The Yale Review, BOMB, and other outlets. For the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was the co-curator of the exhibition Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, which was called "a master class in presenting complicated, troubling art."

Walters' new book is A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint, and it has been long listed for the National Book Award in Nonficiton. It is an impassioned, boundary-pushing work of criticism that traverses an array of subjects, from fine arts to design to architecture.

The crux of the book is that Walters takes aim at the ubiquity of white paint in our society and what its prevalence shows about our society's values. As the default color of the world we created, it asks us to believe that it's neutral, that it has no signifiers, or Williams contends, possible more troubling is that it signifies calmness, blankness, or purity, unassailable, and value-free.

Walters examines all that has been taken for granted about the substance that colors, or more so fails to color, the structures and objects that we are surrounded by. There is a collective impulse towards white paint that has the possibility of telling us about culture, politics, and individual desire.

This was rooted in white paint in art history, architecture, and consumer culture, it follows its influence into the home, the halls of the workplace, the galleries and studios of the contemporary art world, and larger forums of mass culture and national identity. 

Walters never loses sight of how this cultural inclination manifests in our choices and habits and individuals. She takes into account her immediate sensory experiences and instincts to create this very unique form or art and cultural criticism.

AUTHOR APPEARANCE: Wendy S. Walters will be in conversation with Margo Jefferson on Wednesday, October 21 at 7:00 p.m. at Rizzoli Bookstore, located at 1133 Broadway, (212)759-2424