Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s As If Reality Didn’t Exist

Here’s the problem: the more one studies quantum theory, the less one understands about it. Richard Feynman said that and no one has had the temerity to argue the point since. So Rovelli has written a short book whose purpose is not to elucidate the incomprehensible but to demonstrate that incomprehensibility in a comprehensible way. Why did he write it? I suspect that the answer is connected with the remark made by his colleague cited at the very beginning of the book: “It’s as if reality didn’t exist.”

Quantum theory is a peculiar sort of triumph for human intelligence. It is a humiliation for anyone who claims to know what reality means. If reality is constituted by the facts of quantum research - superposition, instantaneous action at a distance, the effects of observation, etc. - then all other facts are compromised. As Rovelli is keen to point out: after a century of scientific effort, quantum theory has never been proven wrong. In which case its results are more than confusing. These results contradict our experiential intuition, our logic, and the fundamental concept of truth.

So the old joke, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?,” takes on a tragic new meaning. Not only do our eyes lie. Everything everyone has reported about the world - except about quantum physics - has been false. Not just useful approximations, but false. This is not a matter of, for example, continuing to use the term sunrise when we all know this an ancient belief turned metaphor. It means nothing is continuous despite appearances. It means there are no things, only relations with no fixed components, only a scientific language with no clear referents outside itself, and a range of contrary interpretations about how to connect that scientific language with the words we use with each other.

This is intellectually humiliating no matter how spectacular the practical consequences of quantum research. Such research allows us to do things we simply don’t understand from the production of nuclear weapons to plant breeding. But whatever it is that lies behind the veil of the quantum equations, if anything, is as inaccessible now as it was when Plato wrote about his cave or Leibniz his monads. Could it be that this is the essential meaning of quantum physics, namely that the enterprise we call ‘thought’ is not what we presumed? Perhaps thought has nothing to do with appreciating reality, approaching truth, or understanding how things work.

Perhaps instead, thought is ‘merely’ the term we use for human cooperative effort full stop. Rovelli implies this in his highlighting of the group-think manner through which quantum physics emerged. Not just that of the 20th century scientists commonly associated with the science, but also their, often obscure, predecessors whose work they exploited. In other words, it is not the practical results which are important but the massive collaboration required to produce the ideas that have become common currency. And the fact that these ideas have turned the tables on their creators by going rogue, as it were, are a provocation by thought to yet more cooperative thought.

It’s a thought.

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