Rovelli’s book displays a very Levi-like enthusiasm for abstruse facts of all kinds. As a happy integration of science, literature and philosophy, Helgoland owes something to the Italian chemist-writer Primo Levi, whose literary-scientific memoir, The Periodic Table, reached the UK bestseller list in 1985 alongside Dick Francis. Humans exist by virtue of their continuous interactions with one another so, too, do atoms and electrons. It forms the basis of all modern technologies from computers to nuclear power, lasers, transistors and MRI scanners.įortified with reflections on Vedanta Hinduism (the author has a hippyish past), Buddhism, Dante, Empedocles and Democritus, Rovelli applies quantum theory to various philosophies.

Ultimately, says Rovelli, Heisenberg’s is a theory of how things “influence” one another. 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. Our world is understood to be non-deterministic and essentially unpredictable moreover it works in ways that often strike us as non-intuitive. Photograph: Roberto Serra/Iguana Press/Getty Images ‘A deep-thinking, restlessly inquiring spirit’: Carlo Rovelli. Heisenberg’s intuition was that electrons moved in diffuse, cloudlike waves. Gone was the old idea that atoms consisted of tiny electrons that moved mechanically round heavier protons – as planets orbit the sun. It was there that the 23-year-old, stricken by hay fever, conceived of the “strangely beautiful interior” of an atom’s mathematical structure and, at a stroke, overturned the certainties of classical physics. The theory was first developed in 1925 by the young German physicist Werner Heisenberg during a summer holiday he spent on the barren North Sea island of Helgoland. Rovelli’s new book, Helgoland, attempts to explain the maddeningly difficult theory of quantum mechanics. Only in recent years has science become, in publishing terms, popular and attractive again. His books continue a tradition of jargon-free popular scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin that disappeared in the academic specialisations of the past century. Nobody said that post-Newtonian physics was easy, but Rovelli’s gift is to bring difficult ideas down a level. In The Order of Time and Reality Is Not What It Seems, Rovelli illuminated the disquieting uncertainties of Einsteinian relativity, gravitational waves and other tentative physics. His wafer-thin essay collection, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, sold more than 1m copies in English translation in 2015 and remains the world’s fastest-selling science book. C arlo Rovelli, the Italian theoretical physicist, is one of the great scientific explicators of our time.

Carlo rovelli the order of time review