The Chair You're Sitting On Is Not Still

By Andy — 2026-09-22 — Literary News

Rovelli asks you to look at the chair beneath you. Is it moving or still?

Your first answer will be wrong.

This is the opening gambit in his new collection of essays, and it's worth dwelling on because it reveals something uncomfortable: the planet we've evolved on has warped our intuitions so thoroughly that we barely notice it anymore. We live in a small village. Most of us never leave. And we've built an entire understanding of reality on its local quirks.

The surface of Earth is a peculiar thing. Light takes a tenth of a second to circle it—fast enough that we phone Shanghai from Paris and feel like we're in the same room, fast enough to dream of a shared "now" across the globe. But zoom out. The universe doesn't work that way.

Consider what else we take for granted. Solid things. Objects. A pen. A stone. A house. On Earth, solidity is common sense. Then you look at Jupiter—vast, fluid, chaotic, with no "things" to speak of. There's no object-hood out there, only phenomena. We mistake the particular for the universal.

Or take air. We treat it as absence. "This glass is empty," we say. It's full. We just can't see the filling. The evanescence of air has convinced us that empty space exists somewhere, that void is possible. It isn't.

Then there's gravity—more or less uniform across Earth's surface. This means time moves at the same rate for everyone here, which is not true elsewhere. Two travelers separated and reunited in the wider universe won't have aged the same amount. But we feel time as a shared experience. A common current we all move through together.

Actually, that's not quite right. Time isn't something we move through at all—that's exactly the kind of Earth-bound metaphor Rovelli is trying to untangle. The point is simpler: our planet feels stable, feels shared, feels orderly in ways most of the cosmos doesn't. We've built our conceptual frameworks on sand and called it bedrock.

A child born in a village expects the world beyond it to speak the same language, wear the same clothes, follow the same rules. When it doesn't, the child is amazed. That amazement, Rovelli suggests, is the beginning of science. The hard part is recognizing that our prejudices run deeper than language.

When we speak of "now" in a distant place, we're speaking nonsense—beautiful nonsense, perhaps, but nonsense nonetheless. There is no common time in the wider universe. Objects don't exist in the way we imagine. Locating yourself by saying "I am here" is meaningful only because we live on a rigid, slow-turning planet. On Jupiter, the question makes no sense.

The chair is moving. It moves with the Earth. The Earth moves with the solar system. The solar system moves with the galaxy. And the galaxy? It's moving too, at tremendous speed, relative to what? Relative to where?

There may be no final reference point. There may be nowhere truly still.

Source: "In these six rigorous essays originally delivered as lectures, theoretical physicist Rovelli advances the argument that reality is fundamentally "more complex and varied than we think."" — Publishers Weekly