HELGOLAND: MAKING SENSE OF THE QUANTUM REVOLUTION - CARLO ROVELLI

I sort of broke one of my dumb rules with this one. I’m not someone who really understands physics or chemistry or any of the “hard” sciences, so I try to be careful when I see pop versions of these topics, knowing that the truth is almost certainly much more complicated than whatever is being portrayed in these books. Growing up with scientist parents, I suppose. Physics often offers the most annoying version of this (maybe tied with the evolutionary psych people) wherein people write pop-physics books that claim that not only will they explain quantum physics and thus, ultimate reality, to you, they’ll also tell you what it all means. Normally, if it’s not specifically about Time, one of my favorite topics, I shun the whole genre. That being said, Rovelli wrote one of the best books I’ve read in a while about Time, THE ORDER OF TIME, so I figured I’d check this out. Frankly, sort of a mistake. Rovelli does his best to not speculate too much w/r/t the larger meaning of these findings but it’s inevitable with a topic as fundamental as the basic mechanics of reality. Rovelli comes away with the idea that you shouldn’t think of individual objects or entities, and instead see the whole thing as connections, and objects as the collection of these connections, including, vitally, the observer. “All the (variable) properties of an object, in the final analysis, are such and only exist with regard to other objects.” Or, more broadly, “The mistake here is to assume that physics is the description of things in the third person. On the contrary, the relational perspective shows that physics is always a first-person description of reality, from the perspective of the observer.” Heady stuff, very far-out but it’s, fundamentally, based on math I don’t understand and thus basically have to take their word for, which basically makes it a religious text. On that note, I did do that weird book telepathy thing where you’re reading, think of something then the author touches on this exact topic in the next sentence. To me it had to do with Nāgārjuna, who’s been on the brain a lot recently. Reading over his theories about it being impossible to separate individual objects from a unified whole, I wondered if he’d ever read the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Sure enough, there is a whole chapter on this topic in the book. Overall, a nice quick short read, but I’m going to continue to not really understand quantum physics. Going back to my rule about Time books. 1 connected universe