Is there a theory that can apply Einstein’s laws of general relativity to quantum mechanics? This is what several scientists are trying to imagine, including the Italian Carlo Rovelli who is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity. Already the first two are complex to understand, you can imagine that his theory is enough to cause some migraines. Luca Pozzi, an Italian contemporary artist passionate about science and particularly space-time, discussed these dizzying concepts with Rovelli a few years ago. The result is this comic strip, “Loops”, published in Italian last year and now translated into French.
“It took a cloud of situations and for the network of this cloud to become very precise, for me to digest certain themes, to arrive at this book years later,” Luca Pozzi explains to us. It is also the result of discussions I had on the subject with my wife, (the Italian-Thai designer Elisa Macellari, author in particular of the magnificent “Taste of Papaya”) during walks in the jungles of Laos and Thailand to give birth to this album.
Easy to read, not to understand
Luca Pozzi did not want to draw it himself and therefore entrusted the creation of images to Elisa. “I prefer to connect people to each other rather than being the only author, it creates an ecosystem.” But what does “Loops” say? The conversations Luca had with Carlo Rovelli are transposed into a dialogue between the two men during a walk in a southeast Asian jungle. And Rovelli attempts to explain the most difficult concepts such as space quanta, the song of gravitational waves or the philosophy of the Indian monk Nāgārjuna, according to whom things only exist because something is missing.
Don’t run away! This comic is extremely easy to read, but not easy to understand. Perhaps that’s not what matters. The way these concepts are presented and illustrated gives the impression of feeling them rather than assimilating them. “That’s it, the real image must emerge in the reader’s brain, so he can visualize things that cannot be seen on the pages. When the explanation turns into poetry, we are there.”
To achieve this astonishing result, Luca Pozzi first wrote a screenplay without dialogue. “And I could already see how Elisa was going to put it into images and when she did, it fully matched what I had seen. Then we worked on the dialogues and speech bubbles together, as well as the rhythm. The book is divided into seven chapters, like Carlo’s work, “Seven Brief Lessons in Physics.” And everything is thought of as loops, with the reader returning to the starting point at the end.”
A tennis ball wanders through the album
It is a constant game between the authors and the reader, with, for the most attentive, the joy of discovering surprises, such as a small yellow dot in certain margins which, when using the pages as a flip book, reveal a tennis ball that loops. “Yes, there are quite a few easter eggs (Easter eggs, as the secrets hidden in video games are called).”
The references are numerous, we certainly miss a lot. Elisa Macellari’s jungle drawings are reminiscent of Le Douanier Rousseau. “With de Chirico light,” explains Luca. For Carlo Rovelli, science is the awareness of our ignorance, which he illustrates with the Greek Anaximander who was the first to say that there did not exist a top (the sky) and a bottom (the Earth), but that there could also be sky under the Earth. It’s going to see further than what we think we are, and this album “Loop” allows, if not to understand, at least to believe we perceive what Rovelli means by “the world is made of a network of kisses, not of stones”.
Who can read “Loops”? “In Italy, I not only had scientists, but a very heterogeneous audience, with people aged 13 and 90 years old. Now I am preparing to transpose the book into a museum exhibition and I am looking forward to seeing how people will perceive it.”
“Loops”, by Luca Pozzi and Elisa Macellari, Ed. Ginosko, 168 pages.
