Listening to a cultivated person of today who jokes and almost boasts of his scientific ignorance is as sad as listening to a scientist who boasts of… - Carlo Rovelli

In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aim- lessly. You don’t get anywhere by not ‘wasting’ time – something, unfortunately, which the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.

If we formulate the fundamental theory of nature in a timeless language, we have then the problem of recovering the familiar notion of time.

What makes the difference is the mass. ...[T]he earth is a big mass and it slows down time. If you go to a bigger mass, like Jupiter, it's stronger. If you go near a big star it's stronger. If you're near a black hole... it's even more strong, so strong that if you go very near... time essentially stops down. It goes very, very, very slowly.