Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli
Published 2014 · 234 pages · 65,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · History, Nonfiction, Science & Nature
How hard is Reality Is Not What It Seems to read?
Reality Is Not What It Seems scores 30 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 35 out of 100
- Physics and history of science vocabulary. Accessible for a book about quantum gravity.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Quantum gravity and granular space-time are profoundly abstract but well-analogized.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with physics from Democritus to loop quantum gravity.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Chronological history of physics building to loop quantum gravity.
- Symbolic density: 22 out of 100
- Granular space. The atom as recurring metaphor. Reality as layers of illusion.
- Ironic distance: 80 out of 100
- Warm, enthusiastic tone. Genuine intellectual wonder.
- Resolution withholding: 22 out of 100
- Loop quantum gravity is unfinished. Rovelli is honest about what remains unknown.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Chronological from ancient Greece to present. Three parts with clear progression.
How Reality Is Not What It Seems is regarded
Reality Is Not What It Seems holds a literary regard score of 44 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.