Perhaps the world’s most beautiful creations are the theories of science that experiments prove true many years later. Their truth remains a matter of conviction till empirical evidence supports it, and that is what makes them works of art too.

The recent confirmation of gravitational waves, whose existence Einstein had proposed a century ago, only reminds us of the abstruse nature of this beauty. Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s glorious essay, The Most Beautiful of Theories, unravels in the most elegant prose the mysteries of Einstein’s two theories of relativity, taking the reader breathtakingly close to the wonders of the principles that arrived at the truth of the universe through a combination of the icy precision of mathematics and the hot fire of genius.

This essay is one of his Seven Brief Lessons on Physics that Rovelli has brought together in a book that in itself is a treat to the senses. To understand the cosmos without equations getting in the way is an extraordinary opportunity. We are grateful to Rovelli for providing it.

Published in Italian in 2014. Translated into English by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre, published in 2015.