Helgoland

by Carlo Rovelli

But Jordan had shown too much loyalty to Nazi Germany, and those defeated in war do not receive recognition.

What is an observation, when there is no scientist observing? What does quantum theory tell us, where there is no one measuring? What does quantum theory tell us about what happens in another galaxy?

What quantum theory describes, then, is the way in which one part of nature manifests itself to any other single part of nature.

This is a radical leap. It is equivalent to saying that everything consists solely of the way in which it affects something else. When the electron does not interact with anything, it has no physical properties. It has no position; it has no velocity.

and for the great character Arkady Bogdanov in Kim Stanley Robinson’s delightful trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars.

Aleksandr Bogdanov dies an incredible death, in a scientific experiment in which he exchanges his blood with a young man suffering from tuberculosis and malaria, in an attempt to cure him.

Our prejudices concerning how reality is made are just the result of our experience. Our experience is limited.

‘The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away, and think this to be normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to

Science is not a Depository of Truth, it is based on the awareness that there are no Depositories of Truth.

I believe that we need to adapt our philosophy to our science, and not our science to our philosophy.

Whereas in classical physics the interactions between an object and the measuring apparatus can be overlooked – or if necessary can be taken into account and compensated for – in quantum physics this interaction is an inseparable part of the phenomenon. For this reason, the unambiguous description of a quantum phenomenon is required in principle to include a description of all the relevant aspects of the experimental arrangement.

all phenomena are quantum phenomena.

‘I say therefore that what by nature can act on another or suffer even the slightest action from another, however insignificant it is, and even if it happens only once, this alone can be truly real. I therefore propose this definition of being: that it is nothing if not action

The contextuality that permeates the world reaches this elementary grammar. There are no elementary entities that we can describe except

Everyone has the right to seek to cure themselves as they see fit. But no one has the right to cheat their fellow citizens with the kind of quackery that can cost lives.