Introductive Chapter of a Book on Quantum Gravity, Edited by Daniele Oriti, That Will Appear with Cambridge University Press

Hundred and forty-four years have elapsed between the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, which has opened the great scientific revolution of the XVII century, and the publication of Newton’s Principia, the final synthesis that has brought that revolution to a spectacularly successful end. During those hundred and forty-four years, the basic grammar for understanding the physical world has changed and the old picture of reality has been reshaped in depth.