March 15, 2021
The theoretical physicist and bestselling author digs into his discipline's most confounding concept. As lucidly as he can, Rovelli shows that while quantum theory may clarify the foundations of science, it doesn't make sense. "Its mathematics does not describe reality," he writes. "Distant objects seem magically connected. Matter is replaced by ghostly waves of probability." And yet, it "has never been found wrong." The author begins with the easy part: the history. Helgoland is a barren island in the North Sea where, in 1925, a young Werner Heisenberg spent the summer trying to explain how electrons behave. The 20-year-old explanation that atoms consisted of tiny electrons whirling around heavier protons--as planets orbit the sun--didn't work. Electrons don't whirl like specks of matter but rather in diffuse, cloudlike waves. However, whenever scientists deal with an electron (such as in a particle accelerator), it becomes a speck of matter. After much agonizing, Heisenberg decided not to explain electron behavior but simply describe what happens. The result was a brilliant, if clunky, formulation using mathematical matrixes that correctly predicted what experiments showed. Within a few years, other geniuses (Schr�dinger, Pauli, Dirac, Born) refined and simplified Heisenberg's work, and quantum theory was off and running. After 100 years, scientists still agree that quantum theory remains an enigma, but it works so well that only a persistent minority, Rovelli included, try to make sense of it. In the book's second half, more philosophy than science, the author maintains that every entity in the universe, from protons to humans, exists only in relation to other objects. Something that didn't interact would be invisible. Expressing doubt over Ernst Mach's insistence that science must be based on the "observable," Rovelli leans toward the Buddhist teaching that "there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else." Often heavy going, but a thoughtful argument that "all nature is quantum" and that we should go with the flow.
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Starred review from April 1, 2021
On the windswept island of Helgoland, 340 kilometers from the Copenhagen labs where he had studied atomic physics with Niels Bohr, a 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg first formulated matrix mathematics, which exposed the "strangely beautiful interior" of subatomic quanta, so plunging the scientific community into utter perplexity. Rovelli invites readers to share both the beauty and the complexity. In particular, readers learn how Heisenberg's science compelled physicists to ask, Is it an observer who makes quantum events real? Rovelli's account ventures deep into the struggles of scientists and philosophers as they wrestle with that question, vexingly complicated by baffling later discoveries about quantum superposition, quantum indeterminacy, and quantum entanglement. Readers see just how desperate these wrestlings have become in the stunningly counterintuitive perspectives of Multi-World and Hidden-Variable quantum theories. In his wide-ranging inquiry--hinging improbably on an ancient Buddhist text--Rovelli finally reaches an understanding of quanta as an endless regression of relationships, mirrored images forever reflected in other mirrors. Some readers will resist Rovelli's relational interpretation of quantum mechanics as a reason for dismissing as metaphysical illusions both the immortal soul and the individual consciousness. But a very wide community of readers will thrill to this intellectually exhilarating dive into the profoundest scientific conundrums.
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