If you have read Manjith Kumar's "The Quantum", then Rovelli’s new book, "Helgoland", would appear a paled down version of the former. However this book apparently attempts to explain the complex theory of quantum mechanics from the view point of a specific scientist - Werner Heisenberg- and a particular place. Helgoland is a rocky, barren, windswept island in the North Sea to where the 23-year-old that scientist, a German physicist fled in June 1925 to recover from a severe bout of hay fever and was in need of solitude to think. Quite ostensibly the author begins the book with lot of historical facts and one such fact that attracted my attention was the Goethes' love and poem for Islam.
The initial address is more philosophical, like everything should be based on what one sees and not on what one assumes to exist. Reality and Experience thus are important forbearers of these.
There is this astonishing mention of the fact about Neils Bohr being kidnapped in a British Commando raid and taken out of occupied Denmark to England where he was received personally by Winston Churchill. It was probably some sort of exercise in those war-torn era to extracts facts about USA's Nuclear mission as later he was sent back to USA. The fact that atomic bomb had killed nearly 200000 persons in a fraction of seconds in the first attempts itself is scary.
Schrodinger's scandal is passively mentioned where he was accused of fathering two of his students! His wife would go on to comment "You know it would be easier to live with a canary bird than a race horse, but I would prefer race horse", is bizarre.
With the light touch of a skilled storyteller, Rovelli reveals that Heisenberg had been wrestling with the inner workings of the quantum atom in which electrons travel around the nucleus only in certain orbits, at certain distances, with certain precise energies before magically “leaping” from one orbit to another. Among the unsolved questions he was grappling with on Helgoland were: why only these orbits? Why only certain orbital leaps? As he tried to overcome the failure of existing formulas to replicate the intensity of the light emitted as an electron leapt between orbits, Heisenberg made an astonishing leap of his own.
He decided to focus only on those quantities that are observable – the light an atom emits when an electron jumps. It was a strange idea but one that, as Rovelli points out, made it possible to account for all the recalcitrant facts and to develop a mathematically coherent theory of the atomic world. But he kept the question literally open, "Are the laws of nature really not deterministic?" Our world is understood to be non-deterministic and essentially unpredictable; moreover it works in ways that often strike us as non-intuitive. Quantum theory invites us to see the world as a giant cat’s cradle of relations, where objects exist only in terms of their interaction with one another. Ultimately, says Rovelli, Heisenberg’s is a theory of how things “influence” one another. It forms the basis of all modern technologies from computers to nuclear power, lasers, transistors, touch screens and MRI scanners.
For the Plancks' constant without which our Master's degrees are incomplete there is a mention that Planck himself was not sure about it or rather said that without understanding it. You multiply the position by velocity to get an approximate value of it! But from quantum Computer to atomic bomb this factor has come to stay. The simple formula, "xp-px=i", indicates us to look towards the mathematical tables (“matrices”) to predict the electrons’ wave mechanics nature. His work was soon refined by other forward-looking physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac. Quantum theory was sired out of Heisenberg’s observations and Einstein’s earlier relativity theory. When the electron does not interact with anything, Rovelli argues, it has no physical properties. It has no position; it has no velocity.
Here are some worthy lines that are quoted directly to preserve the impact:
# "You should never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think"- Neils Bohr said and Schrodinger demonstrated it with his Imaginative Cat experiment
# The debate between Bohr and Einstein went on for years and has become a subject of many books, conferences, themes of seminars and letters.
# The wave nature of an electron is a real entity in "Many-Worlds" interpretation in addition to real and actual electron - David Bohm
# Doctors cannot evaluate a patients' mind without affecting them!
# The vast world is not made up of scientist in Laboratories or instruments of measurement. What is an observation when there is no scientist observing? - Scientists and instruments are all part of nature. This is referred under a coined word "Qbism".
# The electrons do not follow an orbit because its physical properties are only those that determine how it effects something else, e.g. light that it is emitted when it is interacting.
# A property may be real only with respect to a stone and may not be to all.
# The individual is bourgeois fetish - Bogdanov.
#Basics of one science are understandable in other branch of science.
# In the Q world it is made up of happenings, discontinuous events without permanence - Qbism.
# Uncertainty principle: We have gathered maximum information about an object but it is still possible to learn something unexpected about it. The is not determined by the past , the world is probabilistic!
# How can you think that the experiments in a lab made with a little bits of metals and glass can have such significance as to put into a question ' how the world works'. We still live at the bottom of deep gravity well.
# The world is not divided into stand-alone entities . It is we who delve with objects for our convenience.
The author gets help in the form of one of the most important texts of Buddhism, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or The Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way. Written in the second century by the Indian philosopher Nāgārjuna, its central argument is simply that there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else. It’s a perspective that Rovelli believes makes it easier to think about the quantum world. He may be right, but the words of Niels Bohr still come to mind: “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”
Brain does not work like we think on seeing. Signals do not travel from eyes to brain, rather they go the other way from the brain to the eyes. (it expects something it knows and previously occurred) and predicts what the eye should see. because what would be the point of sending signals towards the brain that do nothing but confirm what it already knows.
We dream an image of the world based on what we know. The world that we observe is continuously interacting; it is better understood as a web of interactions and relations rather than objects.
Individual objects are summed up by the way in which they interact. If there were an object that had no interactions, no effect on anything, it would be as good as non-existent. Like most other authors views on 'Observation and Interaction', this book made an interesting reading on relativity.
