Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution
by Carlo Rovelli
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution:
“It is the limit up to which we can determine physical variables.”
“It describes how every physical object manifests itself to any other physical object.”
“I believe that we need to adapt our philosophy to our science, and not our science to our philosophy.”
“If I look at a forest from afar, I see a dark green velvet. As I move toward it, the velvet breaks up into trunks, branches and leaves: the bark of the trunks, the moss, the insects, the teeming complexity. In every eye of every ladybug, there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every cell is a city, every protein a castle of atoms; in each atomic nucleus an inferno of quantum dynamics is stirring, quarks and gluons swirl, excitations of quantum fields. This is only a small wood on a small planet that revolves around a little star, among one hundred billion stars in one of the thousand billion galaxies constellated with dazzling cosmic events. In every corner of the universe we find vertiginous wells of layers of reality.”
“What I see, in other words, is not a reproduction of the external world. It is what I expect, corrected by what I can grasp. The relevant input is not that which confirms what we already know, but that which contradicts our expectations.”
“The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty.”
“Quantum theory is of no direct help in understanding the mind.”
“When Einstein objected to quantum mechanics by remarking that “God does not play dice,” Bohr responded by admonishing him, “Stop telling God what to do.” Which means: Nature is richer than our metaphysical prejudices. It has more imagination than we do.”
“Bertrand Russell describes the same idea thus: “the raw material out of which the world is built up is not of two sorts, one matter and the other mind; it is simply arranged in different patterns by its inter-relations: some arrangements may be called mental, while others may be called physical.”
“the properties of an object become manifest when this object interacts with others. We cannot separate the properties from these other objects. We cannot attribute them just to a single object. All of the (variable) properties of an object, in the final analysis, are such and exist only with respect to other objects.”
“A lightbulb does not emit continuous light, it emits a hail of evanescent photons. At small scale, there is no continuity, or fixity, in the real world: there are discrete events, interactions, gapped and discrete. Schrödinger had fought tooth and nail against quantum discontinuity, against Bohr’s quantum leaps, against Heisenberg’s world of matrices: he wanted to defend the image of continuous reality provided by classical intuition.”
“It is with sadness that every so often I spend a few hours on the internet, reading or listening to the mountain of stupidity dressed up with the word “quantum.”
“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.’104”
“The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.54”
“I want a theory of physics that accounts for the structure of the universe, that clarifies what it is to be an observer in the universe, not a theory that makes the universe depend on me observing it.”
“I look at a forest from afar, I see a dark green velvet. As I move toward it, the velvet breaks up into trunks, branches and leaves: the bark of the trunks, the moss, the insects, the teeming complexity. In every eye of every ladybug, there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every cell is a city, every protein a castle of atoms; in each atomic nucleus an inferno of quantum dynamics is stirring, quarks and gluons swirl, excitations of quantum fields. This is only a small wood on a small planet that revolves around a little star, among one hundred billion stars in one of the thousand billion galaxies constellated with dazzling cosmic events. In every corner of the universe we find vertiginous wells of layers of reality.”
“131 Unless it is the sad hope of being constituted by some vaporous supernatural substance that remains alive after death: a prospect that, apart from being utterly implausible, strikes me as ghastly.”
“But structures are processes are not thereso that organisms can survive and reproduce. It is the other way round: organisms survive and reproduce because these structures have happened to gradually develop. They reproduce to populate the Earth because they are functional.”
“I believe that one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty. Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue to learn and to learn better. This has always been the strength of scientific thinking—thinking born of curiosity, revolt, change. There is no cardinal or final fixed point, philosophical or methodological, with which to anchor the adventure of knowledge.”
“What quantum theory describes, then, is the way in which one part of nature manifests itself to any other single part of nature.”
“There is no ultimate or mysterious essence to understand that is the true essence of our being.”
“We usually speak of probability when we do not have all the data.”
“external perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling ‘hallucination’ a false perception, we must call external perception ‘a confirmed hallucination.”
“we are nothing but images of images. Reality, including our selves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which . . . there is nothing.”
“to inquire about the ultimate foundation of everything is to ask a question that perhaps simply does not make sense.”
“This clarified, here is the point: it is possible to think of quantum physics as a theory of information (in the sense outlined) that systems have about one another.”
“due to which the value of one variable implies something about the value of the other.68 This is the meaning of the word “information” that I am using here.”
“The solidity of the classical vision of the world is nothing other than our own myopia. The certainties of classical physics are just probabilities. The well-defined and solid picture of the world given by the old physics is an illusion.”
“What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see. This information is conveyed from the brain to the eyes, through intermediate stages. If a discrepancy is revealed between what the brain expects and the light arriving into the eyes, only then do the neural circuits send signals toward the brain. So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain—only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do.”
“Credo che uno dei grandi errori che fanno gli esseri umani quando tentano di capire qualcosa sia volere certezze. La ricerca della conoscenza non si nutre di certezze: si nutre di una radicale assenza di certezze. Grazie all'acuta consapevolezza della nostra ignoranza, siamo aperti al dubbio e possiamo imparare sempre meglio. Questa è sempre stata la forza del pensiero scientifico, pensiero della curiosità, della rivolta, del cambiamento. Non c'è un cardine, un punto fisso finale, filosofico o metodologico, a cui ancorare l'avventura del conoscere.”
