Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

by Carlo Rovelli

a man who has lived at sea level meets up with his twin who has lived in the mountains, he will find that his sibling is slightly older than him. And this is just the beginning.

Heisenberg imagined that electrons do not always exist. They only exist when someone or something watches them, or better, when they are interacting with something else. They materialize in a place, with a calculable probability, when colliding with something else. The ‘quantum leaps’ from one orbit to another are the only means they have of being ‘real’: an electron is a set of jumps from one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is not in any precise place. It is not in a ‘place’ at all.