Book Review: Helgoland

The burden of literature is great. I've been reading in a number of books these past few months and like to keep a record here, but it is a challenge to find time to read, let alone to record.

On a drive from Nashville to Indiana to Chicago to New York, I listened through a book I bought. (Now there's the burden of going back to underline) It is Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution by Carlo Rovelli. I like Rovelli. He's brilliant. He can make complex ideas understandable.

He also talks too much. It didn't help that the audiobook reader had a pretentious British accent. By the time I was on the last leg of my journey, I was almost hateful toward the verbosity and audiobook reader. Not good from a business perspective.

I did enjoy the first few chapters. It was perhaps the best presentation of Heisenberg and Schroedinger I've ever heard. But like a Jewish apocalypse, it's uncannily accurate until it gets to the future. Since there is no solution yet to the reconciliation of quantum mechanics with relativity, Rovelli can't explain that to us. 

I don't feel like I have the time to summarize the book as I often do. I don't subscribe to the "many worlds interpretation." I would have preferred the "hidden variables" interpretation in my teens and early 20s but not anymore. 

While I found the last few chapters almost unbearably poetic in a British accent, I think he gave us a glimpse of the solution to the current quantum/relativity conundrum in this sentence:

Quantum theory "is the discovery that all the properties (variables) of all objects are relational, just in the case of speed" (83). I am neither smart enough nor young enough to take this kernal to its conclusion, but I wonder if it is the seed of the next revolution.

There is no such thing as inherent speed. "Speed... is a property that an object has relative to another object" (82). What I take from Rovelli's suggestion is that all the fundamental concepts of matter need to be reformulated in this way as well. There is no position but relative position. There is no mass but relative mass. There is no charge but relative charge.

"Objects are such only with respect to other objects" (88).

So who will work this insight through?