The cat is not sleeping

Mr. Rovelli’s book, Hegoland, is a review of the current account of the quantum world. The book is okay, but I am always puzzled when a scientist writes yet another book “revealing” what we have known about QM for the last 100 years. If you are at the layman’s level of familiarity with QM, there is no need to add this book to your playlist.

The 1 part of this book that is annoying beyond measure is when Mr. Rovelli re-writes Erwin Schrödinger’s cat. For those unfamiliar; in Erwin Schrödinger’s “cat experiment” a cat is placed in a “super-position “ box with a cyanide ampule subject to quantum uncertainty.

The result is that we will discover that the cat is either dead or alive.

However, Mr. Rovelli finds Schrödinger’s experiment exceeding his delicate feline sensibilities.

So, he re-writes it.

In Mr. Rovelli’s alternate world the cat is either sleeping or awake.

Mr. Rovelli’s condescendingly introduces Schrödinger’s cat metaphor as “the original”
version...to suggest that he has improved it.

Mr. Rovelli, you have “improved” nothing.

Mr. Rovelli speaks extensively about this thought
experiment, and the constant referral to the cat either being awake or asleep further confuses an already difficult concept.

Mr. Rovelli owns a cat, which explains a lot. I am wondering if Mr. Rovelli is aware that Schrödinger’s cat was a THOUGHT experiment.

Science has become increasingly politicized, frequently twisting “facts” to comport with
an outcome that supports a desired position.

I am deeply suspicious of an author who carelessly and willfully rewrites ANYTHING
to align with a reality that is more pleasing.

Mr. Rovelli should have invented his own metaphor rather than pirate Schrodinger
and proceed to mangle it into a furball.

It makes me wonder what other areas of science Mr. Rovelli might have adjusted to sit more comfortably with his version of the world.

18 people found this helpful

Phenomenal

Like with his other books, Carlo Rovelli is amazing at explaining physics concepts in an engaging and succinct way, weaving in stories of the physicists, mathematicians, philosophers and others who participated in the intellectual history of quantum mechanics.

I particularly love that unlike many other physicists, Rovelli recognizes the mutual debt that philosophy and physics ("natural philosophy") owe to each other, rather than that philosophy is irrelevant or to be dismissed.

More than anything this feels like a Pragmatic or Constructivist account of Quantum Mechanics. Remarkable to come full circle like this.

8 people found this helpful

Quantum Physics, Metaphysics and Philosophy-

This is a good book, comprehensible, thoughtful and far ranging. It is about much more than the "quantum revolution." It is Rovelli's approach to life including how he came to believe what he does and quantum physics connection to metaphysics and philosophy.

Definitely worth a read/listen.

5 people found this helpful

Brief, dense and riveting

I think Carlo Rovelli writes absolutely lyrical books about very technical topics in physics. To me, this book makes the most sense of what quantum physics may be “telling us” about the nature of the universe and consciousness. And he does so in a friendly, happy and accessible way. Just great.

4 people found this helpful

Too much of a history lesson

If you are interested in a long diatribe about a physicist musing on an island, then you might enjoy the book. I got fed up partway through and returned it. I love books on the quantum world, but this one isn't really about it—more of a history lesson.

4 people found this helpful

New to Quanta

I was entranced by David’s voice, and I love the way Carlo writes. Similar to his first book, I enjoyed reading, it leaves me with more questions than answers. Brilliantly worded, though sometimes I got lost in the actual point of what was being said. While I didn’t mind, I will relisten and reread to further my understanding.

4 people found this helpful

Fabulous!

As a retired engineer, I found this most insightful. I am rethinking my understanding of physics (quantum) as it was taught to me at university. Bravo!!!

2 people found this helpful

No technical explanations but not needed.

This is a "why" study quantum physics and an attempt to connect meaning to its findings. Great book!

1 person found this helpful

a wonderful fresh view on the quantum

Rovelli has taken me on a journey from the conception of quantum mechanics to one of the most interesting interpretations I have encountered and finally has sparked some thought about the relation on the mind/body issues giving also a bright and fresh new perspective! great great great

Relational QM (RQM)

Relational QM (RQM)

This is a bit of an odd book...The first part is a very brief, and very shallow introduction the how QM came about. Then just as briefly and shallowly discusses why QM is considered weird. Then he covers briefly the most important interpretations of QM, Multi-World (MW), Bohmian Mechanics (BM), and Quantum-Bayesianism (QBism).

Rovelli's critique of the MWI is: "is it really worth giving credence to the real and concrete existence of infinite copies of ourselves, unknown and unobservable to us, hidden behind a gigantic universal ψ?"

Finally Rovelli gets to the real point of this book, briefly describing the Relational interpretation of QM (RQM). RQM takes a QBism perspective and holds that the state of a system only has meaning relative to another system. Thus in MWI there is no meaning to the state of the universal wave function as there is no other system the state could be described relative to. In RQM two observers (that are just two systems) could have different interpretations of some other system. If those two observers then interact, they would then become consistently correlated (from each others' perspective).

Unfortunately, RQM mathematically seems to have the same "copies of ourselves, unknown and unobservable" to any finite extreme (just not infinite copies as in MWI), but this does not seem to bother Rovelli due to the QBism perspective. This seems to be a bit of a unsatisfying "shut up and calculate" perspective.