What happens to the matter that falls into a black hole? This, the rockstar theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli told me, is “a child’s question”. It is also the question that has preoccupied him for the past eight years. “We trace the matter falling and entering, we see it disappearing. Where does it go? There’s this huge universe around us, full of holes. The Italians have this thing for the pasta with all the holes: scolapasta, we call it. Maybe there is no word in English.” A colander? Rovelli did not seem to think much of this poor approximation. “Colan–? Whatever,” he laughed. “The universe is like that.”
Rovelli, 67, in a polo shirt and jumper, his hair almost white but his eyebrows dark, spoke to me from his home in Canada. In 2019 he moved from Marseille to London, Ontario, where his girlfriend, a professor of philosophy and physics, had been offered a position.
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