Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

by Carlo Rovelli

Mach is witheringly dismissive: “The conception of the [mechanistic] world appears to us to be mechanical mythology, like the animistic mythology of ancient religions.”92 Einstein recognized his debt to Mach on numerous occasions.93

Am always open to learning about criticism of the mechanistic conception of the universe. Interesting to find it here.

Reality may be much more complex than the naive materialism of eighteenth-century physics. Prophetic words, for just a few years later Werner Heisenberg would open the door to the quantum level of reality.

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.

from an insightful, philosophically informed book I'm reading.

If the fine grain of the world is made of material particles that have just mass and motion, it seems difficult to reconstruct our perceiving and thinking complexity from this amorphous grain. But if the fine grain of the world is better described in terms of relations, if nothing has intrinsic properties except in relation to other things, perhaps in this physics we can better find elements able to combine in a comprehensible way, to be the basis of those complex phenomena that we call our perceptions and our consciousness.

Relations make up our “I,” as our society, our cultural, spiritual and political life. It is for this reason, I think, that everything we have been able to accomplish over the centuries has been achieved in a network of exchanges, collaborating. This is why the politics of collaboration is so much more sensible and effective than the politics of competition