Factually! with Adam Conover - Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics with Carlo Rovelli

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Quantum mechanics is over a century old, yet most of us still struggle to truly understand it. This week theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli is on the show to discuss his new book Helgoland and help Adam begin to truly understand how quantum physics can fit into a broader picture of reality. Check out Carlo's book at factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for spending an all those other sciences, all that biology, sociology, psychology, hell, even chemistry, why? All those just devolve into physics, right? At root, physics is the study of what truly exists and everything else is details. Physics is foundational. And on top of that, it has also made massive progress over the last few centuries. And that progress has not only helped us understand the universe at a fundamental level, it has not only brought us

immense technological change that's benefited all of us and also killed a lot of people, let's not forget that. But it has also produced some of the most incredibly surprising and counterintuitive results in all of science. Results that many of us struggle to comprehend even a century after they were established. So let's not just talk about physics. Let's talk about quantum fucking mechanics. Yeah, quantum mechanics. I know a chill just went down your spine. You're like, oh, this conversation is suddenly going to get completely incomprehensible and also really woo woo. Right. Is Adam going to start talking about multiple universes? No. Let's talk about why we are so fascinated, yet also so confused by quantum mechanics.

I mean, these ideas were developed a century ago, and still most of us struggle to make sense out of them. I mean, book after book has been written about it. Documentaries have been made about it. I have read and seen at least five or six of them, and I am still no closer to understanding what the fuck it means. And I think you might be in the same boat. And this is frustrating because while I am not a scientist, I do consider myself someone who can, you know, understand scientific concepts. You know, I can, if I read something written for the layman, or maybe I can even dive into a paper or two, I can get my bearings and understand the broad structure of a field, even though I don't, you know, understand how the math works.

I can listen to the experts and form a working knowledge. With quantum mechanics, though, it sometimes just feels that there's a barrier between me and a true understanding that I cannot get past. Let me give you an example. I went to a liberal arts college and the idea of this college was that everybody should know a little bit about everything. So we had distribution requirements. It didn't matter how bad you said you were at math. You had to take a science course. The idea of this class was it was taught by a physics professor, but it was a quantum physics class for humanities and social science majors. You could learn about quantum mechanics, but you wouldn't have to do any math. That was the idea. We could

get that base level understanding without actually having to do the equations. And so the professor did his very best. And he was explaining to us Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. If you don't remember it, I'll refresh you on it. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is this weird piece of quantum mechanics that tells us that if we can learn everything about where a particle is located, we will then know nothing about how fast it's moving. And if, alternatively, we know its momentum, we have no idea where it is. And this is because that just by observing a particle, we are changing it. And thus, we can only ever know one of those properties at a time. Well, when the professor explained this odd concept, my friend who was

next to me in the class put up his hand and he said, well, hold on. Maybe there is a way to figure out the speed and direction of the particle at the same time, but we just haven't found it yet. Maybe we're going to learn how to do it soon. And everyone in the class kind of nodded and said, oh yeah, maybe he's right. The professor said, oh, no, no, no, no, that's that's not possible. That's not possible. It's it's it's it's just part of quantum mechanics. You can never know both at once.

And my friend replied, well, I don't know, maybe we just haven't figured it out yet. Maybe one day we will soon. And the professor said, no, no, no, you really can't. I'm telling you, it actually will never happen. And my friend said, no, no, no, you really can't. I'm telling you, it actually will never happen. And my friend said, why? And the professor replied, because the math says it's impossible. OK, fine. I know there's gonna be no math in this class, but let me just show you.

And he like staggered up to the whiteboard and quickly wrote out the math and said, see, if you could know both, then zero would equal zero or whatever. So therefore, it's impossible. OK, you got me. This class class again, was supposed to give us an understanding of quantum mechanics without math. And yet the professor was unable to explain quantum mechanics in a way that was intelligible to us. Very smart, very curious students without using the math that was banned in the classroom. And since none of us

understood the math, then we, in that moment, failed to understand quantum mechanics. We still could not quite get it, despite this very patient professor's best efforts. But what is it about quantum mechanics, among all the sciences, that makes it so difficult for us to grok? I mean, Newtonian physics, I get. Force equals mass times acceleration. Easy. I mean, Newtonian physics, I get. Force equals mass times acceleration. Easy. I mean, Newtonian physics, I get force equals mass times acceleration. I learned it in 11th grade. I still know it today. But quantum mechanics, it has never quite gotten through my skull until I did the interview that you're going to hear today. Our guest today helped break down quantum mechanics for me in a way that for the first time made me feel like I am actually starting to get it and not just get it in some kind of superficial.

OK, I don't know, maybe multiple universes exist kind of way, a way in which I actually started to get an intuitive understanding of how the universe is different if we truly understand quantum mechanics. In the same way that Copernicus's revolution changed our view of astronomy, in the same way that Newton's revolution changed our understanding, my guest today, Carlo Rovelli, helped me begin to understand how quantum mechanics could similarly change my perspective of the universe

in a fundamental way. So look, I'm not gonna preface this anymore. This was one of the universe in a fundamental way. So look, I'm not going to preface this anymore. This was one of the most fascinating interviews I have done on this show in quite some time. I think you're going to love it. My guest today is Carlo Rovelli. He's an eminent physicist and most recently the author of a new book called Helgoland, Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution. And once again, you can pick up that book like you can get the books of all of our guests at factuallypod.com

slash books. Please welcome Carlo Rovelli. Carlo, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. It's a pleasure. So you've written a new book called Helgoland. Did I pronounce it correctly? Perfectly. And this is a book about quantum mechanics, which is a topic I have tried to understand at many times throughout my life. I've taken classes.

I talked about it in the intro. I took a class when I was in college called Schrodinger's Cat and All That that attempt to explain quantum physics to liberal arts students. And I sort of got it. I've seen documentaries. I've read books. It's a very difficult subject. You write in the introduction to this book

that taking quantum mechanics seriously is an almost psychedelic experience because it asks us to renounce in one way or another something that we cherished as solid and untouchable in our understanding of the world. I relate to that. But why do you write that? Because you're telling me that you never understood quantum mechanics, right? That's what really you're telling me. And you were right. So you understood correctly that you didn't understand quantum mechanics. I had the opposite experience.

You know, at some point I became a good student in physics. Not early, but at some point I really plunged into it. It was late in my university years. So I was a science student. So I read five books on quantum mechanics. I said, I got it. I understand. It's completely clear. And I spent a few years like that, saying, okay, I've understood quantum mechanics. And then I sort of thought better and I realized that, in fact, I had not understood quantum mechanics. Because quantum mechanics is subtle, tricky, complicated, confusing. In fact, I moved to the States. I started teaching in a faculty in Pittsburgh.

I started teaching in a faculty in Pittsburgh, and the older scientist, my master there, used to tell me, oh, Carlo, you think you understand quantum mechanics? Explain it to me. And I slowly realized that I didn't. So that put me on a path of trying to understand it better. It is really complicated.

It's tricky. But is it... In what way is it tricky? Give me an example. Like, I understand that the math is difficult, for instance, and I don't feel that I would ever, I will ever understand the math fundamentally because that's not my forte. But I also don't understand the math behind Newtonian physics,

but Newtonian physics makes sense to me. I understand the principles behind it. Exactly. No, it's not about the math. The math, in fact, if you want to do the full complexity, I mean, it's Hilbert space, it's a complicated thing, non-commutative algebras. But in reality, you can do quantum mechanics with just pluses and minuses and multiplication. You just have couples of numbers. If you study it in the book by Feynman, Feynman's a great, great scientist of the second half of the 20th century.

He makes it very simple mathematically. So the complication is not mathematical. The complication is what you're saying. It's, I mean, the mathematics is clear and using it, it's easy. Every engineering, well, sorry to the engineering, a lot of people use it then, you know, chemists, astrophysicists, physicists, condensed matter physicists, you use the theory. And somehow you have a quantum system. Quantum system is an atom, a piece

of matter that is your computer, one of the chips of your computers, or the sun. And the way the math works is that you look at something, okay? I see that the atom is so-and-so. You make a calculation, it predicts what you're going to see next. Okay? You do a little calculation, it's not too complicated, you check and bingo, it's always right. It's a century. It's always right. So you can stop here, be happy. You have understood quantum mechanics, right? But then there's a little voice inside you that tells, okay, so this is what I see

first. This is what I see next. The calculation tells me how to go from here, here. What happens in between? And in between, you try to make a story and the story is strange. It's just very funny. Okay. So, the quintessential thing is that, you know, you have a wall with two holes and you have a particle here. You want to compute where it goes the other side. You do a calculation. You see where it goes. There's a probability it might go here, you want to compute where it goes the other side, you do a calculation, you see where it goes.

There's a probability it might go here, here. It works very well. Okay, so when the particle goes from here to here, there are two holes. I want to know which hole it goes through. And if you ask this question, everything falls apart. Because if you go

through one hole, you get a result. If you go through the other hole, you get the same result. Okay? But that's not the result predicted by the theory. The theory tells you that it goes to both holes. Wait a minute, how can it go through both holes? And it's over and over again. The theory tells you, you know, the Schrodinger cat is alive and also dead, that you see one thing and you see the opposite. I mean, this only if you ask what happens between the observations. So then everybody gets confused at this point, because some people say, I don't want to know what happened when I don't look. I only want to know what happened when I look.

Other people say, wait a moment, this is science, we're supposed to ask questions. And if you try to ask questions what happened in between, everybody comes, wait a moment, this is science. We are supposed to ask questions. And if you try to ask questions, what happened in between, everybody come up with a story and many stories out there. And all of them are strange, incredibly strange. I remember the experiment with the holes. I remember this from high school physics. And this is the point at which I stopped understanding. Everybody stops understanding.

It doesn't make no sense. Is this where the particle goes through the holes and it starts to begin to act like a wave and it appears in difference? Exactly, exactly. So that's another way of viewing it. So one way of writing the theory is to write this wave, right? There's a wave function.

So you have a particle and it opens up like a wave and a wave passes through both holes, right? Because if you have a pond and you make a wave with your hand, it goes and if there are two passages, the wave passes between both. So that seems very reasonable. Ah, I got it. The particle is a wave. Very easy. There's a problem. You never see the wave. You always see the particle at one point. When you look, the wave disappears. So in your calculations, what you do in your calculations, it's incredibly funny. You see the particle here. I make a calculation. I did waves around. It's all over. And then you see the particle at one point and then the wave, pop,

just focus there. It's called the collapse of the wave function. But it's nonsense. How can a wave which is all over just suddenly collapse in a point? Nobody believed that. But it is a wave because it passes through both. But it's not a wave

because they see a particle. So what? That's a confusion. This is what I remember from my high school class. And you're right. It's like, you can do the math, you understand how it works. And it in fact works in an applied sense. An engineer, as you say, could make use of this phenomena in a very predictable, repeatable way. But when you try to understand, it's when we try to do the next step and say, what does this mean about the world? How does the world

work? We meet immediate paradoxes. Exactly. So, you can try to make sense of what happened in the world, but whatever you do, you get to something, some strange thing.

Let me give you an example. Please. Some people say, no, no, no, no, no. The point is that it's really a wave. I mean, it's just a wave. Okay. So this opens up and the wave and the electron is really spread out. And then you say, wait a minute. Why, when I look at it, when I interact with it, I see it in one point. Okay. So be careful,

hold on your chair. Because some people, I mean, very serious philosophers, very serious physicists with all respect, what they think is that, okay, this is because you, Adam, also are a wave. This is because you, Adam, also are a wave. Oh, no. So when you, yeah, yeah, yeah. In Oxford, philosophers, they all believe that. And some great friend of mine, which are great scientists. So when you see the particle, when you interact with electron, your wave spreads out.

So this means now there are two Adams. There's one Adam that sees electron here and one Adam that sees the electron there. They're both real, very real. Oh my God. Now, why do you say, well, I see one position, not the other. The answer is, well, because you're one of the two. So there's a copy of yourself that has seen the other.

Okay. People believe that. People take that extremely seriously. I don't think that's the right way of going. But you see, it's not because they're stupid. It's because whatever you do, you end up in something funny. Yeah. You immediately almost run into what seem like metaphysical questions in the philosophical sense.

And that's unusual for science. Most scientific fields, I don't think, lead us to those questions quite so quickly. I mean, you know, certainly genetics has a tendency to, you know, can interfere with people's sense of self or psychology or things like that. But quantum physics, it seems that when we, the mind recoils in some way, in some fundamental way, and it often seems to me like it's a bridge I'm never going to get over, that I'm never going to understand it in a truly deep way, that the paradox will always be there. And that at some point, maybe the point is to stop worrying about it and just

fucking get on with doing the math. No, I don't think, yeah, I agree with what you say, but I don't think I agree with the last sentence that you said, or maybe we should just, because it's true that in some senses, it's philosophy, it's not science. And in fact, some physicists take that position, especially if they work in a context in which it's good enough. Many people doing condensed matter, many people working in the lab. But look, let me give you an example. When Copernicus did the Copernican revolution, he found different ways of computing the way the things go around. And he said, well, I have understood that the Earth is not the center of the universe.

The center of the universe is the sun. Now, think for a moment. Is that a scientific statement? No, because there's no way to know what is the center of the universe. It's just metaphysics. It's a reinterpret center of the universe. It's just metaphysics. Yeah. Right? It's a reinterpretation of the motions.

But it's a good metaphysics because it opened up the right way of thinking that led to Newton, Galileo, Huygens, Kepler, and modern science. Another example, because you see, this happens much more commonly than what... You see, there was a discussion at the end of the 19th century about atoms. Atoms were used a lot by chemists, just a mathematical way to talk about a combination of substances. You want to make water, in the right universe, you have one part of oxygen, two parts of hydrogen.

So they say one atom of oxygen, two atom of hydrogen. But nobody really believed that these were actually particles gluing together into the molecules, little things. So it was a huge discussion. Are they things or not they things? They're just mathematical.

And some scientists that turned out to be the ones who were right said, no, no, no, this is a really thing. Look, they're really little sort of balls there. And the little water is really made little things which have one oxygen and two hydrogens. It's not a calculation, it's for real. And Einstein is one that took them seriously. And with that idea, he was able to deduce all sorts of things. So the boundary between what you can measure and the right way of thinking, it's fluid. Science is not just about, you know, mathematics and what you can measure. Science is about getting the right perspective, getting the right ideas.

Like everything in life, right? In life, you don't want numbers. You want the right way of thinking about things. To take a political decision, it's not just a bunch of data. You have to write the framework. What are the important issues here? You have to figure out what are the important issues.

Or in your life. Your life is about, you know, seeing it from the right perspective. A friend comes to you and say, Adam, don't look this way. Look at that way. You say, ah, yeah, you're right. Now go ahead. So you really feel we should be trying to reorient our perspective as a result of quantum mechanics rather than saying, oh, this is too, I'll never understand this, or it's too inhuman in some way, like our minds can't wrap around it. We should instead be trying to adjust our perspective based on what we learned from it.

Exactly. I think that to be a good scientist is to explore new ways of thinking, explore new ways of conceptualizing. That's what Newton has done. That's what Maxwell has done. That's what Einstein has done. That's what Boltzmann has done. I mean, all these great scientists, Feynman has done.

I mean, all these great scientists have learned the physics of their time and they have not just written a new equation. They have said, look, these are the wrong concepts. Einstein didn't know two things are simultaneous well it's obvious what simultaneity means

it's not obvious think about it give it up that thing that seems obvious think a different way and that's going to work better well much of your book is about Heisenberg and about his own struggle I think

to understand these issues tell me about that piece of it. That's probably the best part of my book, I think. It's a beginning because it's a story. It's a fantastic story. The guy's 23. Listen, Adam, your audience, how many are 23? That's a moment in which you can do great science. Many of them. All the friends of him he does quantum mechanics with are kids of his age. I can say kid, I'm past 60.

So, I mean, 23 is kids for me. And it's their absolute radicality, this courage of thinking something completely new, don't take for granted what's been talked at school, that lead this group of kids to this incredible evolution. All our contemporary physics is based on that. So he's, it doesn't come from the blue, right? He was totally focused on the problem, studying a lot, studying physics, studying philosophy, reading all sorts of things. And everybody was confused about how the atoms work. And Heisenberg goes alone in a little island in the

Northern Sea. This is because between England, Denmark, and Germany, there's a tiny island, which has no trees, windswept, very wild, few people. And he goes there because he suffers for some sort of allergy. And there are no trees there. So it's good for his health. But he also goes there.

Yeah, that's why he went. That's a big response to allergies. I know a lot of people who have allergies in the springtime. I don't know anyone who's- So go to a little island without trees. Stay there. And maybe you'll find a quantum theory, maybe you'll find the greatest revolution of all.

Incredible, incredible. Maybe it's not sufficient for doing that, but it might be an ingredient. Yeah. So he goes there and he focuses, we have his diary when he talks about that. And he focuses completely on the problem. Totally emotional.

He's alone. Alone. He reads poetry. He reads Goethe. The poems about Islam and Iran, Persia. I mean, Goethe, the greatest German poet, has this collection of poetry about Islam, his love for Islam.

So it's an incredible mix of ideas, you know, poetry, Islam, philosophy. He was a reader of Mark, all the equations about atoms, all that. And he tries to solve this thing that nobody was able to solve. How does the atom move? How does the electron move

in the atom? People tried equations, forces, nothing was working. And there he has this idea. I mean, forget about the particles, it's not a particle. Forget to describe where it goes. Just describe what you see, what it enters, what it exits. And he cooks up some little mathematics and then the mathematics magically start to work. And he says, he writes that sort of the afternoon of June 7, we have the date exactly, the math starts to work. So he's all excited and he does his calculations. And then, of course, because he's excited, he makes mistakes. So he starts making mistakes and then he has to correct it. It goes for it. It goes deep in the night. And at some point he gets the right results. The one will

come in from the experiments. He just gets the result of the experiment from his gut, so he understands that he's the first to see a new level of reality, so to say. So he goes out in the night, it's three o'clock in the morning. he climbs a rock in the island, there's these huge rocks that go out over the sea, and he waits for the sun to come up. The sunrise is full of this emotion of having been the first who has seen something new about reality. It's a great story. And then he comes back, he publishes his paper, and with a few friends he just put up this, what we call quantum mechanics today. It gave me the image, you know, the painting by Caspar David Friedrich,

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog? It's like this man, the German romantic painting. It's this man standing in front of rocks with like waves crashing. I saw it when I was in college. It always stuck with me. It's like, that's exactly what you're describing is this image from this painting.

That's right. That's exactly right. And there is something about romantic German, German romanticism in this account that Heisenberg gave of this story. And there is something romantic, I think. That's the beauty of science, right? Science is not just numbers, brute facts, not just, you know,

there are 15 particles and there are four forces. That's the boring part of science. I think the beauty part of science is when, you know, you jump into the empty space of knowledge, you see something new that nobody else has seen before, this emotion, this davening that suddenly understand that you know, animals and us, we have common ancestors. It's incredible. It's just, wow! It just changes what you mean by human, right? Human is just, you know,

I am a brother of that little squirrel there. I mean, we're really cousins. Not metaphorically. The mother of the mother of the mother of the mother of the squirrel and the mother of the mother of the mother of the mother of the squirrel, and the mother of the mother of the mother of mine is the same person. Wow!

That science is the best. Absolutely. But what that really strikes me is the intro, the sentence from your introduction that I read about quantum physics being a psychedelic experience, that's also often a characteristic of a psychedelic experience, is that you

have that feeling of understanding something about the world and being astonished by it. And so that's a way in which science and psychedelics and religious experiences kind of come together, that like astonishment of clarity. Yes. And of course, there are huge differences. Yeah, of course, of course, of course. And the difference of importance

absolutely should not be diminished. But there is something visionary in science which I think even more, it's not so much the discovery of the new, it's a discovery that there are other ways of viewing reality. I think that's the key, right? The way we think about reality is not unique. That's the only possible one. And that's what, if you think for a moment, that's the main message of science, right? I mean, look around you. There is a flat

earth, the sky is only that, and down there is only earth. That's not true. It's true in some approximation. There's a better way of thinking. We are sitting on a sphere and the sphere is spinning. Science is redrawing the world for you. It's rearranging the... telling you things might be different. And in science, religions do... in a sense, religions do the same thing. You can rethink everything differently. Now you think that, you know, you're a Buddhist, that you can meditate and have a completely different sense of yourself, or

if you're a Christian, that, you know, you're an instrument in the hands of God, or whatever. So you re-narrate the thing differently, and psychedelic experience, I think the good part of it is exactly that it opens the mind to the fact that there is just one way of viewing reality. There are many different ways. And if we have open-minded,

better. I think we might become a better scientist and even a better person, perhaps. Yeah. Man. It's really interesting to me that in that account of Heisenberg, you mentioned that he was reading Goethe and that those, you know, that there's a place for that sort of thinking in this story as well. Why do you, why do you center that? Why is that an important part of the story for you? of the story for you? Because I think that nowadays, some countries more, some countries less, science is taught in isolation from the rest of culture.

You know, you go to a science class and you vaguely know that behind those names, they were actually human people with their passions and their ideas and the complexity of their culture. Sometimes you say the Maxwell equation, so you vaguely know who was Maxwell.

So you take science out of the story, but I think that's misunderstanding what the entire scientific enterprise is about. Scientific enterprise is people trying to make sense of the world. And they do that with... I've been teaching history of science also and spent a lot of time in history of science. It's not that science is autonomous. Science has developed under the influences of the philosophical, political, religious ideas of the people involved into the game. Very different, I think. Sometimes in contradiction with another.

Schrödinger, which is one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, was passionate of the Vedanta, the Indian, the part of the Veda, the Hinduism. part of the Veda, the Hinduism. Heisenberg was deeply immersed in the philosophy of Erzmach, a sort of phenomenalism. Newton was reading philosophy. Einstein was Einstein

had read, when he was in his twenties, had read Hume in the original Kant, all the three critiques of Kant. He was passionate about Schopenhauer. He read Poincaré, philosophical writing. And if you look into his physics, you find exactly all this influence.

You find what he got from this, from that. It's only in the recent years somehow that, uh, to some extent it's specialization, right? If you want to do something, you just do that and you forget all the rest, you need some specialization. But to go ahead in science, you have to, uh, to widen your horizons. Uh, and, and, and science has gone ahead by widening its horizons. I mean, Darwin, you mentioned biology. Darwin is, the greatest step ahead in biology. How did he do that? He jumped into the ship and went outside England.

Yeah. Right? He went all over the world. He spent years just going to places and talking to people, looking around. So just get out of your way of thinking. That's the key point. So everything is out of your way of thinking. That's the key point. So everything is good, including poetry about Islam. Well, yeah, science has become beyond professionalized, so technical. And so,

I mean, physics now is done by my sister before she was a science journalist, was working on a neutrino, a big neutrino experiment on a team with dozens of other people. And they would fly to France and then they would meet dozens more people and hundreds of these, you know, large Hadron Collider is as big as NASA practically, you know, in terms of how many people, perhaps bigger, I don't know. And there's not a lot of room for, you can't get all those people together and have them all read Goethe. But that is part of the enterprise. And it's often left out.

That's right. That's right. That's right. And I think that in education, it's good to keep it wide as much as possible also. Because you do one thing good, well, but you do it better if at the same time you have a larger perspective. It seems to me.

Yeah. Okay. I have so many more questions for you, but we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Carlo Rovelli. Okay. We're back with carlo ravelli so when heisenberg left helgoland with this insight and with this mathematics were what did people think when he told them i mean it's baffling enough for me today you know a century later or so um But were they like, this is baffling. Like, we don't, how could this be, you know? It raised a huge, a huge debate very rapidly because clearly he was on something because

he, his calculation worked, worked in the sense that first you could calculate what had been observed in the behavior of the atoms, but also predict new things which were then confirmed. Let's put it this way. This was 1925, 100 years ago, 97 years ago. Wow. So soon there will be the centenary. So he comes back. He does this with Max Born, his teacher, so to say. He was in his 40s.

And the other were all kids together with Jordan, who was his age. And in the UK, Dirac also essentially uses Heisler's paper and put the same theory together. So the theory, they found it in two places at the same time, in Germany and in England. And then Pauli comes in. Pauli is a good friend of Heisler. He's also 23. So these are all kids. And they are all something. And in the small world of atomic physics, I mean, there were a few people

discussing that at the time. Einstein was following very closely. Einstein has a reaction. Here are some friends saying, every theoretical physicist, which means his little group of friends at the time, is following with an almost interest these witchcraft calculations that Eisenberg has born or done. So Einstein himself said, my God, what are these kids doing? They're kids, they're all kids. In the environment, they were calling their physics, club and physic in English, which means boys physics, because they were in their 20s.

So imagine today, a group of five kids of their 20s that come out saying, we have a new fundamental theory. Here it is. What do you think about that? Look, it gives the right spectrum of the spectrum of the helium, right? 15 years later or 20 years when it is, with those equations, there's an atomic bomb of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wow. With those equations. So this Klaben physique has a power which nobody denies. Thanks God, there are

many better things than the atomic bomb. There is all modern technology, all modern, I mean, microchips of computers work with quantum mechanics. Atomic power is quantum mechanics. Lasers, lasers come in all single applications today. It was a CD at the time. Now there's no CDs anymore.

But there are lasers all over. When you enter in a door, it's open, it closes, often it's a laser. Medical application, MRN, how do you say it in English? It's a quantum mechanical phenomenon. More than that, you explain the basics of chemistry just out of equations for quantum mechanics, directly.

It's just... So, nobody doubt that what these kids put together is something totally deep about the structure of reality. But did he understand it? Nobody understood it.

And the way Heisenberg did it, there was no wave. I remember we started by talking about this wave coming up. There was no wave, just probability from here to here. You have a particle here, you can compute whether

you will see here or not. In between, forget it. And then Schrödinger in 1926, the year after, comes out for this wave, sort of fills in between observation what happened in between. And those guys start fighting with one another because, you know, Schrödinger says, well, it's a wave. And I would say, no, it's not a wave because when you see it becomes just collapsed into a particle and, you know, a hundred years have passed and we're still debating the same thing. I don't think it's a wave. My take is not a wave. Forget the waves. I mean, if you forget the waves, you understand it much more clearly. You see, in the book, I talk about

my own way of thinking about this. Please, I would love to hear this. Yeah, let me try. I mean, you really have to go through the book to get it. So my take on this is forget the wave. It's not a wave. A wave is just a way of doing calculations. The key point is that when you take an object, any object, my pen here, the property of this

object are not in the object. It's a way this pen affects me or affects something else, another physical system. Everything is relations. I think this is what in death Heisenberg has discovered. It's not the way I see it, It's the way this affects any other things. It affects this microphone, this computer, this air around it. So we always have to think about

how things affect one another, not how things are. And then you start to make sense because the mistake is to ask what is a thing isolated? And we should never ask what is a thing isolated because things we should never ask what is a thing isolated, because things are not isolated. They are interactions. The interactions become

before the things, in a sense. That's, you know, the working title of my book was Relations, before calling Helgoland. Helgoland seemed a good title because nobody understands what it means. It's mysterious. I want to understands what it means. It's mysterious. I want to know what this Ogoland is. Exactly. So relations is the key way to understand quantum mechanics. And that's deep. I think what Heisenberg understood, I think, 100 years later, is that we should think about the world as a network of relations and not as a set of isolated things. To some extent, we know that already, right? This pen is grey. Why is it grey? Well, it's not a

property of the pen. It's a property of the light interacting with the pen, interacting with me, my eyes. So we understand the grey in the ensemble. An animal is a predator. It's not a predator by itself. It's a predator because there's a prey and it's a relational thing. Okay. If you, I don't know if you're a brother, if you have a sister, but if you're a brother, it's not the property of you being a brother, it's a property because there's another brother. Yes. And so on. And somehow quantum mechanics is understanding that it's all the way down like that. It's relations all the way down.

But that is a boldly philosophical statement as opposed to a scientific statement to say that that almost sounds like something an ancient Greek could have come up with, you know, that things don't exist in themselves or it sounds like it's in dialogue with contu at the idea of the thing in itself um uh instead that everything is uh everything is a relation that's your way of understanding quantum physics is like in philosophical insight. Yeah, that's correct. And that's absolutely correct.

And I think that when it is a philosophical idea and it's, I think we need philosophical ideas to make sense of, of, of the way we understand the world, you know, when Newton and, and his friends in, in the 18th century, say,

came out with the idea that, all right, we have a way of understanding the world. These little particles moving in space. Nobody thought the world this way before, right? In middle-aged Europe, people thought the world in terms of angels and spirits and the reality around us being sort of a mirror of a spiritual world. And physics came out with a very beautiful, if you want, picture of matter moving in space at the forces. But this was taken from philosophy. That's Democritus' idea. It worked very well. Of course, it was rearranged, proven by some mathematical, become super effective.

But it's a philosophical idea. And maybe good to some approximation, but it's not good anymore for quantum theory. We have understood the world is approximate, if you describe it like that, but not exactly. If you want to describe atoms and the small things, we have to give up this idea of this little particle moving in space, each one with its own essence, nature, natural, nature properties. We have to talk about how things interact. It's all about interactions, not about single things. And I think it's a good way of thinking that it's useful,

not just in physics, we know it's useful in general. And we should abandon the idea that beyond the complexity of relations, there is just a substance with property. No, it's more complicated. It's relations all the way down. Wow. I think this way one can make sense of quantum theory. This is so fascinating.

I love this. So I love the comparison you drew earlier to, you know, the Copernican or Newtonian revolution in that, you know, I still talk about the world as though the sky is up and the ground is down and I'm walking around on a flat plane. But I do know, and I have integrated into my worldview, the fact that I'm actually on a giant sphere that is moving around according to its own physical laws. And I don't, that doesn't pose a philosophical problem for me.

I understand why someone might be baffled by that if they heard it for the first time in the year 500 AD, but I understand it. I get it. And it is a philosophical change. In addition to a scientific viewpoint, it is a philosophical viewpoint that I'm not at the center. There is no center to the universe. The world operates according to immutable physical laws. And what you're describing sounds like another philosophical revolution along the same level that I maybe if I was brought up to believe that everything in the in the universe is a relation that it would seem as it could seem intuitive to me? Does it seem intuitive to you at this point after having thought about this idea and come up with it? Are you able to live your life according to this way of looking at the world? I think you put

it very well at the beginning. When you said, particularly well, I very much appreciate it. You said something very on the point at the beginning. You said, I know that I'm sitting on a spinning globe, very, very, very, very on the point at the beginning. You said, I know that, and that I'm sitting on a spinning globe, right?

And I also know that this is not in contradiction with the fact that I consider the ground solid and fixed and not moving, and that's a up, that's a down, and I work this way. I know that there is a story that connects the two. I don't have to think about this story. I know that if I want to think about it, I can. For instance, if you see the sunset, right?

The sunset is real. I mean, you say, oh, the sun goes down, it enters the ocean, how beautiful it is. And then somebody comes to you and says, you know, the sun is not moving. It's not going down. It's just staying there. It's just staying there. It's moving back. Yeah, fine. But it doesn't make the sunset false or

illusionary. It's still true. It's just a more complicated story. So you can hold the two pictures of the sunset in your mind together without any problem. And in a sense, we have learned that already in science, right? When we know that a solid object is made by atoms, this seems smooth.

But, you know, I've learned at school that it's smooth only because there are very teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny things, zillions and zillions of them. So it's not smooth in reality. A lot of empty space with little atoms. All right. So, and that's consistent reality. A lot of empty space with little atoms. All right. So, and that's consistent with the fact that to my finger it seems smooth. So we can hold, we can at the same time think in the normal way because it's appropriate to our, what we're doing and, uh, uh, realize that

more precise scientific thinking has allowed us to, to have a more, a deeper way of how things work, where, you know, this is made by atoms. The earth is running, is turning and, uh, quantum mechanics is true, telling us that the world is not a bunch of particles bouncing around, it's relations between systems affecting one another. So yes, I think that it's going to be a matter of getting used to this way of thinking and it slowly will become, I hope, it will become accepted. You know, like the idea that you and I are actually moving at 10 kilometers per second, so that's the velocity

we're... It's crazy, if you think about it. Oh my God, slop! Yeah. And that's an astonishing point of view, but it is one that has had wide adoption. I mean, the number of, you know,

people, flat earthers get a lot of press, but there's very few of them. And even folks who believe in the literal truth of various religious scriptures would probably agree that we're on a big spherical ball that's moving very quickly. Do you think that, I would imagine, a very large portion of humanity now agrees on this.

Do you foresee a future in which we as a species have a more intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics akin to that? Yeah. If we don't destroy one another with nuclear wars first, if we stop fighting like idiots because I want to be bigger than you, my country stronger than you, then probably if humanity survives this idiocy of us all, then I think with all this if, if we keep learning, yeah, or not even in a long time, I think quantum mechanics is already talked in a very minimal idea, a few things in high school in many countries. I don't know in the US, but in many countries give some, in Italy there is a little bit of quantum mechanics high school. So a little bit, the ideas are beginning to, very preliminary, so it's not without any clarity yet. But I think in a couple of generations, if people start learning quantum mechanics for their kids,

if people start learning quantum mechanics for their kids, that will become a more reasonable way of thinking. And they'll say, oh, grandpa, how do you think that things are just things with properties? You don't know that, obviously, they have relations. I mean, it is taught, it was taught to me to some extent in high school, but it was taught sort of, it was the advanced class. You know, it was like calculus.

Everybody needs to know a little bit algebra, but calculus, that's only for the kids who are really good at math. And calculus was where I couldn't hang anymore in math and I stopped taking the classes at that point. And quantum mechanics, I went through the first level of it and then I said, not for me, but it, yeah, it could be something that we taught more widely. Is there a... Yeah, but the way Stokke did it in high school, it's just a bit

of things, right? It doesn't make much sense. There's just some grains of facts thrown there. Well, in the Schrodinger's cat example for it, like I learned about the particle in the wave, I learned about Schrodinger's cat, and then my teacher kind of went, yeah, I mean, crazy, right? I don't get it either. And then we just kind of moved on, you know, like it was presented as almost like, does a tree fall in the forest and no one's around to hear it? I don't know. Anyway, fun to think about. Let's talk about something else, you know. And it's not an idea that we really take seriously in our education. Talk about what the implications of it are. Exactly, exactly, exactly. And I think there will be a moment in which the Schrodinger cat story will be used to make clear how relations are more than things by themselves.

You see, in the Schrodinger cat story, the point is that it seems that the cat is alive and the cat is dead at the same time, right? But that's not the right thing of putting it. You have to be perspectival. You have to be relational here. With respect to the cat, he's not both two things at the same time. It's just one thing.

It's just either, if you're a cat, you're either alive or dead. You either have seen something or you're not. Period. There is no other story. But this does not immediately imply that with respect to somebody who is outside, the state of the cat is defined.

So you have to say the point is how things interact with somebody who's outside. You have things interact with a cat. So you can give a full description of what the guy who is outside sees, perceives, the interaction with respect to him, and the full description of the interaction with respect to the cat. Everything is coherent. I mean, if the cat sees red and then open the box and you ask the cat, what have you seen? Red.

And you also see red. Okay. So there's clearance. But you shouldn't just imagine that there is some outside view that sees everything at the same time. You should think about the view of the cat, the view of the person, and there might be little discrepancies. Yeah.

Quantum discrepancies. That's it. discrepancies yeah oh i'm still quantum discrepancies that's it i'm starting to get this because uh you know another a theory that is you know the implications are very vast but i feel i understand i have understood into intuitively better is the theory of relativity as relates to time you know i went to the planetarium when i was a kid and they said there's no single objective time time you know depends on uh the rate of speed of the observer. So, you know, someone goes back to the speed of light and they come back and they're very old and all that sort of thing. I understand it.

They've made movies about it. You know, I get it. I understand that this is a property of time and I can sort of think my way around it. And this to me almost sounds similar. I hope I'm not drawing a false comparison, but that, yeah, the mystery of Schrodinger's cat is, well, the reality of this situation is in, it's not objective, it's in the relation between the two parties. Exactly, exactly.

No, you're not misunderstanding, you're right on track here. And the similarity with relativity is strong, right? Because in relativity, you get confused if you think, no, no, no, no, there is the time, the common, the unique time. So it's the same for everybody. And until you hang on to that, you just keep

getting confused. If you think, you know, I have my time, another person has his time, and it doesn't mean that we are in separate universes. We meet, and when we meet we are in the same time. But when we're not together, things might be different.

The timing doesn't have too much in any sense, like in the movies, right? In which you meet your grandfather or you meet your children, and they're old and you're still young. Yeah. Right. Why not? I mean, what would prevent the universe from doing that?

Well, the universe does that. And so it's a similar story. It's a perspectival story. And if you think about it, this is something that is a step that humankind has taken many times. You take something that seems absolute and you realize that, well, no, it's not absolute. It's just the way I view things. Like, you know, this is up.

Yeah. But somebody's in Sydney, so up is that direction. Yeah. So, I mean, who is right? But come on, it's not right. This is my app and that's your app. Yeah. Up is a relative notion.

I have to say, this is honestly making quantum mechanics seem much more approachable to me. Okay, I have to ask you about this before we run out of time. You've written about how your reading of Buddhism has affected your work here. And I'm curious how those things integrate. how those things integrate? People were coming to me and saying, oh, I heard about you this way, thinking that you guys think about quantum mechanics.

Have you read Nagarjuna? I said, who is Nagarjuna? And then another guy was coming, have you read Nagarjuna? And then when, you know, after five, six times that people, completely different people, knowledgeable people, asked me about, have you read Nagarjuna? And this is not just, you know,

do you know about my guru who knows everything? No, this is completely different people who are not religious, pointing out to this Nagarjuna who is a classic Buddhist Indian philosopher, ancient Indian philosopher. It's like, you know, Aristotle for the Western civilization or Plato for the Western civilization. It's a super classic in Indian civilization. So I decided to read it because, you know, you get bored

of doing the ignorant and say, oh, who is Nagarjuna? So I read it and it was a shock because obviously it's something written in the second century. So it doesn't know anything about science, about quantum mechanics, but it's a little bit what you were saying before, right?

You philosophers come out with a perspective that can be useful. And in fact, I found a lot of very useful ideas in his perspective because he has a completely relational description of reality. I mean, his main thesis is that no entity exists by itself. Entities exist only in independence of our entities, which is present in Buddhism philosophy, plays a role in the Buddhist worldview. Yeah. And he articulates very well. He goes on and on explaining that everything you can think

is fundamental and the rest build on it. It's not really. It depends on something else. And then it sort of arrives at the point in which it convinces you that you don't need something fundamental on which to build the rest. You can have all things making sense together without having to ground on something fixed. It's a great reading. It's not an easy reading. I read it with some commentary from some Western philosophers.

But it helped me clarify my mind and make it more clear what we were trying to say about quantum mechanics. Yeah, I've read that in my own readings of, light readings of, I've never read Nagarjuna,

but, you know, this idea in Buddhism that, you know, that there is no no self or the self is empty because it's relational. Exactly. That seems to be a very fundamental idea in many, many Buddhist traditions. Exactly. Do you think that that idea follows from quantum mechanics at all or is that a bridge too far? That's a very good question and a deep question. Let me try to

give the right answer here. I don't think at all that quantum mechanics explains the self, the mind, whatever you want to call it. Different stories. We are not quantum systems. Some people are trying to use quantum mechanics. I mean, we are not quantum systems. Some people are trying

to use quantum mechanics. I mean, we are a quantum system because atoms are quantum. Everything is quantum in a sense, but it's not specifically quantum that helps us understand why we have this subjective view of the world. So directly there's no relation. However, I do think

together with probably the majority of contemporary neuroscientists, that this, like the Buddhist idea that the self is not an entity, it's a complex thing, it comes out from the relation in our neurons. That's right, that's correct. And I think that quantum mechanics is telling us that the physical world is not made by entities, but it's made by relations. Now, if you bring everything together, the apparent discrepancy between material world and the mind almost vanishes. Right? Because if you think that the mind is an entity, I am sort of spiritual entity and the world is little stones bouncing around. Come on, these are two different things, two different things. But if you think that both

of them are actually relations between complexities, then they are just two aspects of the same thing, which does not explain the brain. I mean, the neuroscientists have to do the job, of course, which they haven't yet, because we don't understand how we work exactly. But they do, but it does take away this sense of, oh, my God, it's too separate, my mind from reality. It cannot be the same thing. So yes, in that sense, I think that relational thinking of physics that quantum mechanics suggests takes away a lot of the strangeness of the problem of consciousness. I don't think there is a problem of consciousness. Once we understand better our brain, the so-called problem of consciousness. I don't think there is a problem of consciousness. Once we understand better our brain,

the so-called problem of consciousness will just disappear. You know, we don't have problem of hurricanes. We just know how hurricanes works. So, I mean, this is one of the most, you know, longstanding problems in modern philosophy is the mind-body problem, the problem of consciousness. And you feel that once we fully understand quantum mechanics and we understand the relational nature of reality, it'll disappear, or it can disappear as part of that same change in

perspective that we will say, okay, well, yes, I experienced my conscious mind, but I also know that it is simply a relational relationship with the rest of the world. Yes. I think it will disappear for real when we understand better the actual mechanisms in the brain, which we do not yet. So the brain is very much a closed machine that works fantastically and we don't know how it works, right? If we knew how it works, we could perhaps make another one,

which we're extremely far from that. So we really don't understand the mechanism. But that doesn't mean that it's a priori non-understandable. I don't understand how a Ferrari works, but I think that Ferrari, as we put together, is just a machine, even if it is strange and somebody might find it beautiful. I don't know. God, I could talk to you for hours, but I need to ask you a final question because we're almost out of time. You have very important thoughts to you for hours, but I need to ask you a final question because we're almost out of time. You have very important thoughts to have and very important things to do.

You wrote that you believe one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand things. Tell me about that. And how do we get out of that? Why is that? And is that a trap that we can escape? Yeah, I think it's a trap we can escape. And I do think it's a trap. I think we want a reliable thing. Reliable does not mean certain. And that's a subtlety. And, you know, if I say that, you would say, yeah, of course. I mean, but we always fall in this trap.

You say, yeah, of course. I mean, but we always fall in this trap. What do I mean? I mean, this is my standard example. If I come downtown and I ask, in a city I don't know, and I ask, what is the direction to go to Trafalgar Square in London? And somebody tells me, take your right, left. Am I certain that that's the right indication?

Well, no, I mean, the guy may, you know, dislike me and maybe he hates Italians or maybe I misunderstood, or maybe I said it with the wrong accent or maybe I put it in my smartphone and I mistaped it. But does this lack of certainty prevent me from finding Trafalgar Square? No, most of the time, no. So I'm happy with it, right? I'm happy with reliable information. This guy seems reliable. I think I typed correctly. And that's what we need in life. That's what we need in moral decision. That's what we need in political decision. That's what we need in science. If we ask the question, do I have complete certainty? First of all, if you're honest, we should say no. And worse, if we believe we are certain, we don't learn anymore.

We learned because we were open to have our moral belief, religious belief, scientific belief, political belief challenged. I mean, people came out with the wonders of a modern world because they challenged some previous things. So, thank God there is challenging. So, we should be open to challenge, which means, I believe, that we should never think we're certain. We should think, I have good reasons to believe in that because I've been challenged many times and somehow the belief has survived, my scientific belief has survived, but I'm not certain. Maybe somebody will come with better arguments, better scientific argument, better moral argument, better political argument, and moral argument, better political argument,

and I can change my mind. I think this is better. This is better. Certainty, I mean, we don't have receipt against human stupidity, but certainty has led to massacres, to all sorts of horrors.

Doubts, it's better, I think. That is a message right after my own heart and I think is a wonderful place to end. Thank you so much, Carlo, for coming onto the show. I really can't thank you enough. This conversation has been beyond fascinating. The book is called Hell Go Land.

People can pick it up at our special website, factuallypod.com slash books, or at your local bookshop. Thank you so much for coming on. Adam, that was wonderful. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed this exchange. Thank you for your question and for everything.

Thank you. Well, thank you once again to Carlo Rovelli for coming on the show. If you enjoyed that interview, if you want to check out his book, you can check it out at factuallypod.com slash books. And just remind you once again, when you do so, you will be supporting not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, Andrew Carson, our engineer, Andrew WK for our incredible theme song,

the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I am recording this very episode for you on. You can find me at Adam Conover wherever you get your social media and at adamconover.net. Until next week. Oh, and by the way, I forgot this.

If you want to hear a new topic on the show, you can email me at factually at adamconover.net. Until next week, thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week on Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast.