Praise for Helgoland:
¡°Popular science has rarely been so good.¡± ¡ªProspect
¡°It was with great joy that I discovered and consumed Carlo Rovelli¡¯s latest offering. . . . Helgoland hooked me so hard I read the entire book in one sitting. And then twice more.¡± ¡ªLisa Feldman Barrett, The Chronicle of Higher Education
¡°One of the warmest, most elegant and most lucid interpreters to the laity of the dazzling enigmas of his discipline...[a] momentous book.¡± ¡ªJohn Banville, The Wall Street Journal
¡°Bracing and refreshing¡¦Rovelli is offering a new way to understand not just the world but our place in it, too.¡± ¡ªNPR
¡°A remarkably wide-ranging new meditation on quantum theory with the light touch of a skilled storyteller.¡± ¡ªThe Guardian
¡°Rovelli tackles both the quantum realm and the ways it helps us make sense of the mind with refreshing clarity.¡± ¡ªAnil Ananthaswamy, The New York Times Book Review
¡°Explained with uncanny insight and lyrical grace.¡± ¡ªTIME
¡°This entertaining and legible guide paints the history of quantum theory and lays out its possible meanings.¡± ¡ªScientific American
¡°[An] intellectually exhilarating dive into the profoundest scientific conundrums.¡± ¡ªBooklist, STARRED REVIEW
¡°Physicist Rovelli (The Order of Time) dazzles with this look at the 'almost psychedelic experience¡¯ of understanding quantum theory¡¦These are big ideas, but Rovelli easily leads readers through the knotty logic, often with lyricism¡¦Readers who follow along will be left in awe.¡± ¡ªPublisher's Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
¡°Charmingly idiosyncratic. . . . [Rovelli is] perhaps the finest author now writing on physics and the quantum world.¡± ¡ªThe Article
¡°Rovelli is a genius and an amazing communicator¡¦ This is the place where science comes to life.¡± ¡ªNeil Gaiman
¡°Helgoland is Rovelli¡¯smost beautiful yet¡¦ Unforgettable.¡± ¡ªThe London Times
¡°Another brilliant book by Rovelli, who is emerging as the most approachable yet authoritative contemporary writer about quantum physics. He describes a 'relational' universe in which there are no absolutes and everything depends on interactions between objects. You won¡¯t understand quantum mechanics after reading this¡ªor any other book¡ªbut you¡¯ll have fun trying.¡± ¡ªFinancial Times
¡°Rovelli is a deep-thinking, restlessly inquiring spirit.¡± ¡ªLondon Observer
¡°If anyone can make sense of the topsy-turvy, counterintuitive world of quantum physics, it is Carlo Rovelli.¡± ¡ªThe Times
¡°Inspiring.¡± ¡ªSpectator
Chapter Page
Looking into the Abyss xiii
Part 1
I A Strangely Beautiful Interior
The Absurd Idea of the Young Heisenberg: Observables 3
The Misleading ψ of Erwin Schrödinger: Probability 20
The Granularity of the World: Quanta 30
Part 2
II A Curious Bestiary of Extreme Ideas
Superpositions 41
Taking ψ Seriously: Many Worlds, Hidden Variables and Physical Collapses 54
Accepting Indeterminacy 65
III Is it Possible that Something is Real in Relation to You But Not in Relation to Me?
There Was a Time When the World Seemed Simple 71
Relations 74
The Rarefied and Subtle World of Quanta 82
IV The Web of Relations that Weaves Reality
Entanglement 89
The Dance for Three That Weaves the Relations of the World 97
Information 100
Part 3
V The Unambiguous Description of an Object Includes the Objects to Which it Manifests Itself
Aleksandr Bogdanov and Vladimir Lenin 117
Naturalism without Substance: Contextuality 1...35
Without Foundation? Nagarjuna 142
VI "For Nature it is a Problem Already Solved"
Simple Matter? 159
What Does "Meaning" Mean? 166
The World Seen from Within 179
VII But is it Really Possible?
Acknowledgments 205
Notes 207
Illustration Credits 223
Index 225
I
A STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL INTERIOR
How a young German physicist
arrived at an idea that was very
strange indeed, but described
the world remarkably well-and
the great confusion that followed.
The Absurd Idea of the Young Heisenberg: Observables
It was around three o'clock in the morning when the final results of my calculations were before me. I felt profoundly shaken. I was so agitated that I could not sleep. I left the house and began walking slowly in the dark. I climbed on a rock overlooking the sea at the tip of the island, and waited for the sun to come up . . .
I have often wondered what the thoughts and emotions of the young Heisenberg must have been as he clambered over that rock overlooking the sea, on the barren and windswept North Sea island of Helgoland, facing the vastness of the waves and awaiting the sunrise, after having been the first to glimpse one of the most vertiginous of Nature's secrets ever looked upon by humankind. He was twenty-three.
He was on the island seeking relief from the allergy that afflicted him. Helgoland-the name means Sacred Island-has virtually no trees, and very little pollen. ("Heligoland with its one tree," as James Joyce has it in Ulysses.) Perhaps the legends of the dreadful pirate St£¿rtebeker hiding on the island, which Heisenberg loved as a boy, were in his mind as well. But Heisenberg's main reason for being there was to immerse himself in the problem with which he was obsessed, the burning issue handed to him by Niels Bohr. He slept little and spent his time in solitude, trying to calculate something that would justify Bohr's incomprehensible rules. Every so often, he would take a break to climb over the island's rocks or learn by heart poetry from Goethe's West-Eastern Divan, the collection in which Germany's greatest poet sings his love for Islam.
Niels Bohr was already a renowned scientist. He had written formulas, simple but strange, that predicted the properties of chemical elements even before measuring them. They predicted, for instance, the frequency of light emitted by elements when heated: the color they assume. This was a remarkable achievement. The formulas, however, were incomplete: they did not give, for instance, the intensity of the emitted light.
But above all, these formulas had about them something that was truly absurd. They assumed, for no good reason, that the electrons in atoms orbited around the nucleus only on certain precise orbits, at certain precise distances from the nucleus, with certain precise energies-before magically "leaping" from one orbit to another. The first quantum leaps. Why only these orbits? Why these incongruous "leaps" from one orbit to another? What force could possibly cause such bizarre behavior as this?
The atom is the building block of everything. How does it work? How do the electrons move inside it? The scientists of the beginning of the century had been pondering these questions for more than a decade, without gett...ing anywhere.
Like a Renaissance master painter in his studio, Bohr had gathered around him in Copenhagen the very best young physicists he could find, to work together on the mysteries of the atom. Among them was the brilliant Wolfgang Pauli-Heisenberg's extremely intelligent, pretty arrogant friend and former classmate. But Pauli had recommended Heisenberg to the great Bohr, saying that to make any real progress, he was needed. Bohr had taken the advice, and in the autumn of 1924 had brought Heisenberg to Copenhagen from G£¿ttingen, where he was working as an assistant to the physicist Max Born. Heisenberg had spent a few months in long discussions with Bohr, in Copenhagen, in front of blackboards covered with formulas. The young apprentice and the master had taken long walks together in the mountains, talking about the enigmas of the atom; about physics and philosophy.
Heisenberg had steeped himself in the problem. It had become his obsession. Like the others, he had tried everything. Nothing worked. There seemed to be no reasonable force capable of guiding the electrons on Bohr's strange orbits, and in his peculiar leaps. And yet those orbits and those leaps really did lead to good predictions of atomic phenomena. Confusion.
Desperation pushes us to look for extreme solutions. On that island in the North Sea, in complete solitude, Heisenberg resolved to explore radical ideas.
It was with radical ideas, after all, that twenty years earlier Einstein had astonished the world. Einstein's radicalism had worked. Pauli and Heisenberg were enamored of his physics. Einstein for them was a legend. Had the time perhaps come, they asked themselves, to hazard as radical a step, to escape from the impasse regarding electrons in atoms? Could they be the ones to take it? In your twenties, you can dream freely.
Einstein had shown that even our most rooted convictions can be wrong. What seems most obvious to us now might turn out not to be correct. Abandoning assumptions that seem self-evident can lead to greater understanding. Einstein had taught that everything should be based on what we see, not on what we assume to exist.
Pauli repeated these ideas to Heisenberg. The two young men had drunk deep of this poisoned honey. They had been following the discussions on the relation between reality and experience that ran through Austrian and German philosophy at the beginning of the century. Ernst Mach, who had exerted a decisive influence on Einstein, insisted that knowledge had to be based solely on observations, freed of any implicit "metaphysical" assumption. These were the ingredients coming together in the young Heisenberg's thinking, like the chemical components of an explosive, as he isolated himself on Helgoland in the summer of 1925.
And here he had the idea. An idea that could only be had with the unfettered radicalism of the young. The idea that would transform physics in its entirety-together with the whole of science and our very conception of the world. An idea, I believe, that humanity has not yet fully absorbed.
Heisenberg's leap is as daring as it is simple. No one has been able to find the force capable of causing the bizarre behavior of electrons? Fine, let's stop searching for this new force. Let's use instead the force we are familiar with: the electric force that binds the electron to the nucleus. We cannot find new laws of motion to account for Bohr's orbits and his "leaps"? Fine, let's stick with the laws of motion that we're familiar with, without altering them.
Let's change, instead, our way of thinking about the electron. Let's give up describing its movement. Let's describe only what we can observe: the light it emits. Let's base everything on quantities that are observable. This is the idea.
Heisenberg attempts to recalculate the behavior of the electron using quantities we observe: the frequency and amplitude of emitted light.
We can observe the effects of the electron's leaps from one of Bohr's orbits to another. Heisenberg replaces the physical variables (numbers) with tables of numbers that have the orbits of departure in their rows and the orbits of arrival in their columns. Each entry of the table stands in a row and in a column: it describes the leap from one orbit to another. He spends his time on the island trying to use these tables to calculate something that could justify Bohr's rules. He doesn't get much sleep. But he fails to do the math for the electron in the atom: too difficult. He tries to account for a simpler system instead, choosing a pendulum, and looks for Bohr's rules in this simpler case.
On June 7, something begins to click:
When the first terms seemed to come right [giving Bohr's rules], I became excited, making one mathematical error after another. As a consequence, it was around three o'clock in the morning when the result of my calculations lay before me. It was correct in all terms.
Suddenly I no longer had