It was after the optimistic sense of student revolution in Italy came to an abrupt end with the kidnapping and murder of the former prime minister, Aldo Moro, in that Rovelli began to take physics seriously.
But his route to his big academic career was circuitous and unconventional. When I was young, the problem was how to avoid work. Academia, then, seemed like a way of avoiding the world of a conventional job, and for some years he followed his curiosity without a sense of careerist ambition. And this was a privilege — I knew more things, there was more time.
The popular books, too, have come relatively late, after his academic study of quantum gravity, published in If the theory of general relativity describes a world of curved spacetime where everything is continuous, quantum theory describes a world in which discrete quantities of energy interact. Both theories are successful; but their apparent incompatibility is an open problem, and one of the current tasks of theoretical physics is to attempt to construct a conceptual framework in which they both work.
String theory offers another, different route towards solving the problem. How does time fit in to his work? Time, Einstein long ago showed, is relative — time passes more slowly for an object moving faster than another object, for example. Time, then, is not some separate quality that impassively flows around us. For Rovelli, there is more: according to his theorising, time itself disappears at the most fundamental level. According to Rovelli, our undeniable experience of time is inextricably linked to the way heat behaves.
In The Order of Time , he asks why can we know only the past, and not the future? The key, he suggests, is the one-directional flow of heat from warmer objects to colder ones. An ice cube dropped into a hot cup of coffee cools the coffee. But the process is not reversible: it is a one-way street, as demonstrated by the second law of thermodynamics. Based on that change hypothesis, what kind of change strategies plural might make sense. Compare these with your current work — what changes might you want to make to your existing plans and activities and budget allocation to reflect that?
Then go into the evaluate and adapt discussion. Finally, some common traps to avoid:. Death by diagram : a lot of ToC exercises produce a fiendishly complicated diagram with lots of arrows going in all directions.
A way to make MEL easier : If anything, a good ToC should make monitoring, evaluation and learning more difficult but more useful. Make sense? All comments, suggestions and links welcome, whether on the theory or perhaps more important how to use ToCs in practice. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails.
For information about our privacy practices, please see our. We use MailChimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to MailChimp for processing. Learn more about MailChimp's privacy practices here. Especially in dynamic context ie, fragile states, brewing revolts, etc constant, continuous and quick analyses ought to be integral.
At the end of the day, the theory of change is just that — a theory. How often have we seen ToC being developed and then left untouched in the reviews leading to poor outcomes? The blog is very helpful and on the right track. Just use the current ToC as a starting point for a candid discussion. By constantly combining good analysis and political action, technically sound, politically possible answers will emerge, reform conjunctures becomes visible, and change becomes possible.
If we were able to have more sensible conversations about how our interventions were going, we could use logframes perfectly well. What we have now, is a situation where you still have logframes which are badly used, ALONGSIDE theories of change which are either exactly the same, or are just tick box exercises to be thereafter ignored.
Yes, there are some good ones too. The point of logrames, TOCs and whatever comes next is to get project managers to set out their best assessment of what they think will happen, given what has happened before and on the basis of any analysis that they do.
In other words, their theory. A logframe IS a theory of change. Duncan, good post. You set a framework in a way that is difficult to argue with it- it contains all that it needs to with maybe one aspect- where does the information that informs power analysis and all subsequent steps come from? The question in my view is how to get a continued loop of disintermediated feedback which then by definition takes the driving seat of the entire process, knocking us out of the centar as you rightly point out that will then drive your graph —from the power analysis to hypothesis and testing.
Logframes are theories of change — to a certain extent… If the focus is on the process rather than the end product.
What I find useful in a theory of change process is challenging the language and getting down to the real meaning. I work in the areas of regulation and governance so the context is somewhat different, but I prefer his methodology to others. Then he returns to an examination of options for solution, all for reasons that are well described in the book with lots of examples. Thanks Duncan for the neat summary of ToC. Classical mechanics In the s, building on the ideas of others, Isaac Newton constructed a theory sometimes called classical mechanics or Newtonian mechanics that, with a simple set of mathematical equations, could explain the movement of objects both in space and on Earth.
This single explanation helped us understand both how a thrown baseball travels and how the planets orbit the sun. The theory was powerful, useful, and has proven itself time and time again in studies; yet it wasn't perfect ….
Science at multiple levels Summing up the process. How science works page 20 of 21 previous next. Accepted theories are the best explanations available so far for how the world works.
They have been thoroughly tested , are supported by multiple lines of evidence , and have proved useful in generating explanations and opening up new areas for research. However, science is always a work in progress, and even theories change. We'll look at some over-arching theories in physics as examples: Classical mechanics In the s, building on the ideas of others, Isaac Newton constructed a theory sometimes called classical mechanics or Newtonian mechanics that, with a simple set of mathematical equations, could explain the movement of objects both in space and on Earth.
Einstein's calculations suggest it's possible for an object in our universe to travel through space and time in a circular direction, eventually ending up at a point on its journey where it's been before — a path called a closed time-like curve.
Still, physicists continue to struggle with scenarios like the coronavirus example above, in which time-travelers alter events that already happened. The most famous example is known as the grandfather paradox: Say a time-traveler goes back to the past and kills a younger version of his or her grandfather. The grandfather then wouldn't have any children, erasing the time-traveler's parents and, of course, the time-traveler, too.
But then who would kill Grandpa? A take on this paradox appears in the movie "Back to the Future," when Marty McFly almost stops his parents from meeting in the past — potentially causing himself to disappear. To address the paradox, Tobar and his supervisor, Dr. Fabio Costa, used the "billiard-ball model," which imagines cause and effect as a series of colliding billiard balls, and a circular pool table as a closed time-like curve.
Imagine a bunch of billiard balls laid out across that circular table. If you push one ball from position X, it bangs around the table, hitting others in a particular pattern. The researchers calculated that even if you mess with the ball's pattern at some point in its journey, future interactions with other balls can correct its path, leading it to come back to the same position and speed that it would have had you not interfered.
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