Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Carlo Rovelli: Quantum Weirdness!? ​(#205)

Episode Date: January 4, 2022

Carlo Rovelli was born in Italy, is a US citizen and lives in France. His main activity is in theoretical physics, where he is known as one of the founders of loop quantum gravity. He has also interests in the history and philosophy of science. He has written "Quantum Gravity", a treatise on loop quantum gravity and, for the large public, "The First Scientist: Anaximander and his Legacy", which is primarily a reflection on the nature of science. The book is translated in five languages and has been awarded by the "Prix du Livre Haute Maurienne". Rovelli has worked in various Universities in Italy, the US and France. He is currently head of the quantum gravity group at the Center For Theoretical Physics of the Aix-Marseille University. He is Honorary Professor of the Normal University of Beijing, and member of the International Academy for the Philosophy of Science. In his latest book, Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving. Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious. As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercely debate the meaning of the theory, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships rather than substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for thinking about the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness. Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better comprehend our place in it. Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Please contact [e-mail] to learn more about sponsoring Into the Impossible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our view of the world changed. Heisenberg did something completely new. And it's fantastic because we're still immersed in that revolution, right? The quantum revolution, this, for the point of view of science, this is probably just the center of the quantum revolution. Like the Renaissance was the period of the Copernica revolution. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the first episode of 2022 and featuring today's guest, my friend, Carlo Revelli. who's joining us all the way from Toronto in this particular video. And currently I think he's back in France, where he is a renowned professor and scholar of quantum mechanics and of the theory of time, space, matter, energy. And it was a treat to interview him. This was, again, something I need to beg his forbearance and your forbearance. An interview I conducted six or seven months ago by the time.

you're listening to this and just had so much cool content to put out and needed so much kind of investment to give this episode the attention it deserved that it got delayed. And not the least of which was the recording that Carlo and I have been doing since middle of last year in 2021 of Galileo Galile's dialogue on the two chief world systems. So look for that coming extremely soon. And hopefully in time for Galileo's birthday, the first ever audiobook ever made of Galileo. It's kind of impossible to believe. And when I first heard that remarkable stat that no such audio book existed for the maestro,

I became quite enervated and it inspired me to seek out and hopefully not destroy this wonderful manuscript by one of history's greatest thinkers, but also one of history's greatest writers. And Carlo was the ideal person to land in the star. role of Salviati, the salvation, the chosen one. But anyway, you'll have to wait for that. This episode is about his most recent book, Helgeland, which is a story of another genius. In this case, it involves the story of quantum mechanics and how quantum mechanics came to dominate what we understand about the world. So what is Helgeland? Helgeland is a phenomenal kind of magical quest. I call it a hero's journey. It's really tracing the journey of

of how Werner Heisenberg made critical understanding of how we could conceptualize and formalize quantum mechanics. And he did so in contrast as most heroes have to have. There has to be a conflict, you know, in addition to the protagonist, sort of an antagonist. And I wouldn't say that Schrodinger is Heisenberg's antagonist. But this story traces this isolation that Heisenberg had to go into in this isolated treeless island in the North Sea, where this young guy who's 23 is the age of my students.

And he set the stage for everything that we do in modern quantum mechanics is in some sense tracing its evolution from what was discovered on Helga Land, this remote island, not Legoland. We have that here in California. I've made some discoveries there, such as why are LEGOs so much more painful at night than in the morning when you step on them? But that's for another subject. This topic, we talk about what is a matrix? What does it mean to do? Matrix mechanics?

How can we understand philosophically based on pure math? How can pure math lead us to a philosophical understanding of the interpretation of quantum mechanics? So I devoured this book. It's got many, many glowing reviews. and this book has an audiobook version, which was not read as his last book, The Order of Time, which I interviewed him about last year by the time you're listening to this in 2021, by Benedict Cumberbatch. There are no Cumberbatches narrating this episode, this particular book.

But better than that, we just keep witnessing the maturation of one of our greatest current thinkers who happens to be a great writer. as well. And so I couldn't be more pleased that I'm working together with Carlo and one of my oldest and best friends, Lucio Piccherillo at the University of Manchester, Jim Gates at Brown University, reading the forward of Galileo's dialogue, and also Fabiola Gianati, who's reading Galileo's own author's preface to this audio book. And then finally, Frank Wilczek, who reads Einstein's Forward to the Dialogue. But anyway, you'll have to wait for that. Hopefully, by February.

February 15th or so, I'm going to launch a new podcast. Think like Galileo or something like that or the dialogues. Hope to have some great guests on the show as well. I'm going to try for some stretch guests, but definitely try to get on all my fellow co-authors, Carlo Fabiola, Lucio, Jim Gates, Frank Wilczek, and maybe a couple of surprises because Galileo is more relevant than ever now. This book is 390 years old in 2022. So anyway, this book that you're going to hear about as soon as as I stop yammering on, Helgeland, is another book that will bring to life in a way as Neil Gaiman wrote his Encomium about it. This is the place where science comes to life, where Velli is a genius and an amazing communicator. And that's true, and you'll see it in this book.

We also have a little callback to my episode with Carlo's nemesis, perhaps, his antagonist, Michi Okaku, past guest on the show when Kakou had some negative things to say about, not about Carlo, but about loop quantum gravity, which Carlo, among others, has done more perhaps to popularize than any other person. So anyway, I'll stop yammering. I'll save you the normal spiel about leaving reviews. Now you can leave reviews on Spotify. So please do that. If you're listening on that platform, you just leave a rating. You don't even have to write a review, actually. And you can do the same on Apple Podcasts. And you can also do it on Audible Podcast. So I'd do it on all three, and I would be delighted if you would do the same.

And now, without further, eddieh, please enjoy this episode featuring Carlo Revelli, my friend and co-author or co-narrator, about his wonderful new book, Helgeland, making sense of the quantum revolution. Let's go. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. Welcome everybody to a special segment with Professor Carlo Rovelli, who's a friend, a hero, an adventurer, and an explorer of mental realms beyond which many of us can contemplate. Today, he is coming from the island of heroes, the island of physics, which is also not unrelated to the island that plays a huge role in his magnificent new opus. Hegelgolan, we'll talk about that in this segment. First of all, Carlo, how are you, and where are you, my good friend?

Hi, Brian. It's a great pleasure to be with you. I am in a fantastic place. I'm in a Greek island in northern. Actually, it's almost Turkey. I can see Turkey there from the window called Lesbos. And Lesbos is a magic place because you can say it's the beginning of poetry and the beginning of science, maybe exaggerating a little bit. Because here is well, Sappho wrote his poem, Saffol lived, and Al-Qaril. Two immense Greek poets, and I'm reading their poems, and they're marvelous. But here is also where Aristotle came, spent many years doing his biology. And people say the Lesbos was for Aristotle, what the Galapagos were for Darwin. But it's more than that, because Aristotle biology is probably the first... It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless.

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observational science here in the ESBOS 25 centuries ago. That's wonderful. And when I think about Greece, it's impossible not to think about the Odyssey, Homer, the great heroes of Greek mythology, but also as I think about it, the role of islands plays a huge role in science, as you say. You mentioned Darwin, the Galapagos Islands. We have here in America a shelter island where fine men and many of the greats would gather in the 40s and 50s under government security protection. Their brains were so valuable at the military would come with guns, Carlo, to protect them. And of course, you mentioned Lesbos, where I think Aristotle did do observations. I think he was the first in human history, Carlo, correct if I'm wrong, to determine that way.

whales are mammals and not fish. And he probably did that there. Yeah, yeah. And his science is extraordinarily good. Aristotle has a bad press as a scientist, but it's completely undeserved. He's an immense scientist. So with the laws of logic and just really, you know, creating some of these frameworks. Of course, you've mentioned in the past and other conversations we have about Anaxmander and others that you regard similar status as heroes. But I want to talk now about an island that really is unheard of until this wonderful new book of yours, Helgoland came out. And that's Helgeland Island in the North Sea, which is a barren, tree-swept island where a romantic tale of a 23-year-old

went into seclusion and came out with some revolutionary new ideas that upended the orthodoxy of his time, similar to what Darwin did in his heroic voyage and the Beagle. Talk about this marvelous island, Helgeland, what it means. And I'm curious, have you been there? Many, many years ago, and I want to go back, because now after being immersed in Helgel and thinking for so long for writing this book, I definitely want to go back. This happened 100 years ago. In fact, 98 years ago, 97 years ago. And it's really one of the moments of the great revolutions in science, one of the greatest revolutions in science. Some might say the greatest, which is the beginning of quantum theory.

It's a beginning of quantum mechanics. Not because quantum mechanic was entirely invented there. Quantum mechanics came many steps, but up to that point, bits and pieces of new information about the world that didn't fit together. And this young kid, because he was 23, isn't marvelous, Werner Heisenberg, German,

went to this island that immersed in his calculations, but really because he was suffering for hay fever, and the island has no vegetation. So it was a relief for his allergies. And spent days and days there and came out with this incredibly new idea, which was the turning point of that open up quantum theory. In fact, Eisenberg is the one who got the Nobel Prize.

He's the only one who got the Nobel Prize for the creation of quantum theory, and deservedly so. And the idea was there. He was alone, this magic island. The name Helgeland means sacred, sacred island. Goethe says it's one of the places where you hear more intense the spirit of nature. I don't know if this is true.

But certainly it's a place where our view of the world changed. Heisenberg did something completely. And it's fantastic because we're still immersed in that revolution, right? The quantum revolution, this, from the point of view of science, this is probably the center of the quantum revolution, like the Renaissance was the period of the Copernica revolution. Matter is not the same, reality is not the same after the quantum. And a century has passed, but still, we're still debating among ourselves.

What we really have learned with quantum physics is part. of the fact that, you know, the technology we're using is quantum physics. We understand the atomic structure with quantum physics. We understand the color of the sky. You understand how the sun works. You understand everything with quantum physics. There's never been wrong. All the prediction of quantum theory, all right. We have no idea where there is the limits of quantum theory. So it's the greatest theory ever, in a sense. And yet it's confusing, mysterious. And that's a beauty. And it all started to notice that island. And when I read your words, are so full of poetry and beauty, but you also say in this book that it's a book for your colleagues,

and I hope that includes me, because it's not a simple book. It's not a dumb down. You never do that. You respect your audience too much, and you're rewarded by millions of fans around the world, including having your books translated more times and sold more copies than 50 shades of gray, which, you know, I was a customer for both of those books in that rare cohort. But Carlo, you talk in the book, you talk about granularity. And you talk about Heisenberg, is this link between the granular, between the atomist, between the ancient Greek, Lucretus and Latin scholars. And I want to know when you think about this, the difference between what we can observe

and what really is. That really came home to me for the first time as a professional physicist in this book, that, you know, as you say, Einstein used to say, God doesn't play dice. Boar said, don't tell God what to do, Einstein. But I feel like we kind of sometimes are guilty. and that we tell the particles what to do. And we tell them they should behave like little baseballs so that we can understand them.

Talk about what Heisenberg meant to our reinterpretation of mechanics as a whole. You touch the core problem because what Heisenberg did exactly on that island. It's the following. The problem at the time on the table of the physicists was how the atom works. And it was understood roughly that the atom is this central nucleus that later has been much better understood,

around which somehow there are electrons. But these electrons around the nucleus, like planets around the sun, seem to do very strange things. They were only orbiting on some specific orbits and then jumping from one orbit to the next. One orbit and then they jumped down to another orbit. The famous quantum leaps, the first quantum leaps. And nobody understood what kind of force can move an electron on specific orbits and to these jumps, or which equation of motion can do that. And Heism, this is completely magic.

He said, forget the force. Forget the equation of motion. Keep the equation of motion you had before. Keep the force you have before. Keep the Hamiltonian you have before. Keep the description of before. Change the way you think about the electron. is not a little particle that jumps, it's something else.

What is it? Don't ask. Just ask only what you observe. You don't see the electron, because to see the electron, some light should go from the electron to you. Just talk about the final observation. And this seems against science, right? I mean, it seems to be putting in doubt the entire idea

that you describe what happens out there. You only talk about the observations. But it works because he used this mathematics of the observables, and it fantastic works. And 100 years later, we all do that. I mean, every time the people who design this computer here and the hardware, use essentially the mathematics of Heisenberg of what you observe. And you treat everything like a closed box.

I do this and I observe that. I do this and I observe that. But what does nature care about who observes what, right? What is the observability here? What is an observer? It's not a piece of nature like any other. And so today, everybody uses quantum mechanics in chemistry, in astrophysics, in nuclear physics, in all sorts of disciplines.

And many people don't ask questions, but those who ask questions, what is really going on, between one observation and the other, what happened in between? They split in various interpretations of quantum mechanics, which has been different ways of trying to make sense of that. And my book comes right in the middle of this discussion, right? And some people say, okay, there are things going on there. There's a wave that fills up everything, and then out of the wave in some way we have the observation.

but there is a different way of doing that, a different camp if you want, which make the following observation. If I see the electron, I am a piece of nature, right? You're a piece of nature, Brian. You're not outside nature. And whoever is listening to us, the person observing is a piece of nature. It's not outside nature observing nature. So what quantum mechanics design is,

describe, is not how a man or what, a PhD student observes nature. It's how one piece of nature affect another piece of nature. So that's the way to think about reality, not how things are, not how one thing is, but how two things interact. And the property one thing is the way it affects the other things. And that's a way of viewing quantum mechanics, called relational quantum mechanics, which I in particular defend on that book. So out of this mystery of quantum mechanics,

so the various ways of trying to make sense of it, I describe in detail this relational interpretation, which tell us that the world is not made by things with properties, but by things that interact with one another, and their properties only when they interact. Relations rather than things and properties. And the relations are intimately connected, to observations, which again, it's a trivial example, but Aristotle made an observation

that these fish that were thought to be fish, giant fish, are actually mammals. They nurse their young. They have lungs and blowholes or whatever. I'm not an ichthyologist or a balianologist studying whales. But one thing that's stuck about for me, first of all, whenever I see a book nowadays about quantum mechanical interpretations I had David Kaiser on, we've talked with Adam Becker, many books, Sean Carroll has been a guest many times. And it's, I always get this sensation that, oh my gosh, not another quantum interpretations book.

And that has an acronym I've coined called NICWAB, which in Arabic means very wise or learned. So I want to salute you for being a NICWAB, very, very wise and learned. But when I read about quantum mechanics, I always think, you know, are these kind of, how do I translate it into today's language? So today, there's a war going on and between proponents of strength. theory, for example, lying at the heart of quantum gravity, maybe theories of everything. There are proponents, such as yourself, Lee Smolin, and others, although we'll talk in a different segment about how Lee is maybe becoming a little disillusion, but we'll talk about that later. But nevertheless, I try to translate it.

We're the camps of Schrodinger and Heisenberg in opposition the same way that people in string theory like Michi Okaku, past guest on the show, and yourself might be in opposite camps. Are you dueling? Is it kind of that rivalry that we should? should think about where there will be only one victor or is it not a zero-sum game where both Heisenberg and Schrodinger are correct. Do you see any possibility for that to occur in say, string theory versus loop quantum gravity? Are you asking about Schrodinger versus Heisenberg or you're asking about loop versus strings? I want to say is the is the tension between loop quantum

gravity and string theory reminiscent or rhyming with the history? The history, or rhyming with the history, of Schrodinger versus Heismar. Those are two diametrically opposed, but ultimately harmonious relations, but is string theory reconcilable with loop quantum gravity? Or is only one theory going to prevail? There have been an attempt to combine the two and to see the two as different,

possible different aspects of some larger correct theory. And I don't think this is impossible. Maybe there is a larger point. of view, because in loop quantum gravity does not address the problems that are addressed by string theory, namely the unification, the idea of that all the forces should be an aspect of a single thing. So from the point of view, luke quantum gravity, these are not problems that are addressed. So I am, I don't have an opinion, if you want, a strong scientific opinion about those

problems. And vice versa, from the point of view, string theory, in spite of a lot of progress recent, I would say that the real problem addressed in the loop quantum gravity, which is understand the quantum nature of space time, has never been really addressed so far. I mean, people talk about that and recognize it. And Christ goes around by putting theories on the boundary, theories the bulk, and things like that. But if you're also string theory, what happened here in the very, very small of the Planck scale, he has no answer. While loop quantum gravity has an answer, has a tentative answer because we don't have an experiment yet, but there's an answer.

There is a very precise theory of quantum gravity here in this mole, just the quantum aspect of space time. So could it be that there's a larger theory which is like loop quantum gravity when you describe space time and like string verification? It could be. But you know, Brian, everything could be. That's not very interesting what could be. It's interesting what we can do today. And I don't think today the question is what is the ultimate theory of nature. I have never been interested in the ultimate theory of nature.

I'm interested in solving probably one by one, right? I'm interested in what happened to Black Hole at the end of the evaporation. And I can compute it. I am computing it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm computing it. I'm interested to what happened at a super short scale and we're computing it. These are problems that can be solved on the basis for our current knowledge, general relativity and quantum mechanics. And that's what blue quantum gravity does.

And so when we look at the kind of tension between the Schrodinger interpretation and the Heisenberg interpretation, matrix mechanics, wave mechanics, you go into great depth about the kind of beautiful tension between the two, but the ultimate harmony, reconciliation and union and some sense of the, the school that says shut up and calculate versus those that say, you know, we have to obsess about the interpretations. Yeah. And then, but I look at things like matrix mechanics in a different light now. And again, this book is written not just for the general public, although anybody with an interest and a time to put it in will appreciate this delightful book. But certainly my colleagues and I appreciate it because you make the point that, you know, Heisenberg really came out of

the same milieu of classical mechanics, Poisson brackets, Hamiltonians, and so forth. So I view it as, and you give this wonderful introduction to commutation relations. So you show it on the page here and we'll put the equation. Famous, I think it's on Heisenberg's tombstone, right, this equation, the commutation relation, that they don't commute, that momentum and position don't commute. And I think that is the fundamental essence of quantum mechanics. I agree. And I really appreciate it.

after this book. But I want to ask you, the presence of imaginary numbers plays a much bigger role in quantum mechanics than classical mechanics. It's almost like we have to translate into the complex universe to comprehend it. And there's no surprise that we can't understand it because we can't visualize what a quantum. Now, I've always wanted to ask you this. In the wave mechanics of Maxwell, there are imaginary numbers and we have complex numbers. How come that is, we don't have books about interpretation of Maxwell's equations, why is it that the presence of an imaginary number in quantum mechanics causes so much more difficulty for the human brain, our consciousness, than the presence of an imaginary number in a classical mechanical field like electromagnetism

or regular ordinary relativity? Let me answer to various things you have said, Brian. First of all, thank a lot for what you have said about my book being of interest to a person like you, namely to a real scientist, not... I have a strange experience with my books. They are loved more by the extremes and less by the middle. Namely, the people who react with more excitement to my books are those who know nothing about science.

And I have a story which says, look, this is interesting because this happened, this happened, this happened. And as you say, I never try to cheat, but I take away a huge amount of things. I don't talk about that, I don't talk about that, so I just give the core. And those who know science very well, like you, you work your dirty hands with science, read the book and say, ah, that's an interesting take on that, on that. So it's a perspective.

This is interesting by itself. In the middle, there are a lot of people who know some science and look for popularization book for adding more details. And then they get disappointed because they don't find what they have studied. studied. And they say, oh, come on, but I studied at school that is so-and-so, and this book doesn't say that. What's the point? Okay? So I get the criticism from the middle, and I got the biggest praises from my grandmother who doesn't know how to do five times seven, and from a Nobel Prize who I'm not going to name here, who is an enemy of mine. But he was excited about the book. So that's exactly what my books in a sense are different than the standard popularization hood.

Yeah. Well, you know, Carlo, I'm Jewish and there's a Yiddish proverb that he who stands in the middle of the road gets hit by both sides of the traffic. There's probably an expression too, right? So you should exploit. If it appeals to everybody, it appeals to nobody. And I love that about your books. I learn something and every time I read your books. And I read a multiple times.

I love you say that. You're very kind. Now let me talk about Heismegger and Schrodinger. That formalism that they introduced, which are completely different, turned out to be an aspect of the same story. That was a remarkable. There's Schrodinger who realized that first. So in a sense, they were doing the same mathematics.

But the physical interpretation was going on completely different. And they fought at the beginning. There was even some bitter exchange between, between the two in particular, between the two camps, the camp which was in Göttingen, Heisenberg, but also Max Bourne, Jordan, and all those people, and to some extent, Iraq in the UK, and the Schrodinger camp, and Einstein was on his side, they had a very different view of what they had discovered. And to some extent, we're still there. There are some people who think a la Schrodinger, namely is a big wave.

It's just everything waving. There's no particle. It's just a wave. And the particle, for some strange reason, the particle end up being manifesting itself as a wave. And that's the Schrodinger camp. And the Heismel account, still today, are people in various ways, right?

Cubies, relational quantum mechanics, prospectival views, other perspective, think, no, no, no, no, no, no wave. The wave is just your, you're doing calculations. There's no wave there. There is a particle that at some point, point hits something and there the particle is in a point. And but, and Schrodinger himself, which was the other camp, Schrodinger shifted camp,

at the end of his life, he said, okay, it was wrong. And said, no, no, no, no, an electron is not a wave. It's just a particle, but not a continuous particle, a set of discrete interaction. It's like snap, snap, snap, snap, snap, that's what an electron is. this basic discreteness of the manifestation. Max Born had the same intuition. Heisenberg had the same intuition. And I think many physicists don't have that intuition today,

and I think this is misleading. It's much better to think of quantum mechanics as manifestations of one piece of the world with respect to another piece of the world, instantaneous. So you are, Brian, the way you affect the world. You are what I see you.

I am the way I affect the world. An electron is the way it manifests itself to something else. Everything which is only because it's in relation with something else. The world is a network of relations, not an ensemble of things. So, you see, in reality, it has not been resolved. the tension between Schradinger and Heisenberg. We are still in the middle of the discussion and bringing argument to one intuition

of the opposite intuition. But that's great. Because let me say one last thing. Because you said, oh, good, good. You said, why do we... I'm so confused about quantum mechanics, the AI, the Maxwell equations. You can write also them with AI,

and we are not confused. But wait, you and I are not confused, but Maxwell was. And at the time of Maxwell, there was a huge discussion, what the hell the Maxwell equation mean. Maxwell thought that this was an effective description of a mechanical gears inside the aether and trying to make up with these mechanical models of what happens inside. And it was very slow. In fact, it took only at the time of Einstein, I think. So 40 years later, it became clear.

as a physicist said, the Maxwell theory is just the Maxwell equations. Namely, forget the gears, forget the aether, forget all that. Just keep the electric field, the magnetic field. You don't need anything else. You don't even need the space time in which they're sitting. That came with Einstein and generativity, right? So the discussion about the interpretation of the Maxwell equation has happened, but we have converged to one view.

I think if you and I sit down, I think, what is for you the Maxwell equation and what I have for me the macro equation, We have the same intuition. We know what we're talking about. Maybe we use different words, but we understand one another. And it takes time. It took 40 years. The quantum mechanics is much more radical a jump,

but I think we will end up agreeing to a new vision of the world. And the Maxwell equation changed our picture of the world. Before it was particle with forces. And now after Maxwell's fields, we have this idea of fields. It's a big jump. But the jump from classical, mechanics, things with property, to quantum mechanics, relations between things is much bigger. Yeah, and you mentioned that's beautiful. I always joke with people. Imagine if Twitter

existed when Maxwell was coming up with his mechanical analog. So he would have said, here are these four equations, and Haviside would have, you know, promoted them and everything. Oh, this is brilliant. And then he would have said, and the interpretation is gears and bortices and whirls and ether. And people would have said, ah, you're nuts. It's crazy. And they would have thrown away Maxwell's equations for 50 years or something like that. So that's a warning about Twitter and about social media, and you stay away from it mostly. I'm more involved in it lately, but I want to talk about social media, and this is provocative, but you mentioned networks, you mentioned connections, and the matrices of Heisenberg are another way of expressing a network

effect. So you can put the two particle interactions, but you could also have your friends and my friends, and we're friends on Facebook. We're not friends on Twitter. I don't know why. I'm going to become a friend of you just so immediately to you. Okay, that was a shameless. That was a shameless grovel for that. But imagine all of our friends, my friends go across the x-axis, your friends grow across the y-axis, and then we look at all the different pairs of combinations, right? So that network, because the matrix is symmetrical, you know, your friend of my friend is the same as my friend of your friend like that. But there's also an aspect of entropy.

In other words, the number of connections grows as the number of particles or, friends squared. So it grows very fast, but the cost kind of grows as the number of friends. Like, you don't have to maintain, like, spend twice as much energy when you have square a rate of two more friends added or whatever that means. But there's, so there's an aspect of entropy. There's more ways for, you know, friendships to grow. And it made me think in your book of, you know, maybe Heisenberg actually did more than he realized. In other words, there's an entanglement. Once you have the matrix, you have an opportunity for entanglement, for entropy. and for things to propagate at large distances.

Unlike Schrodinger interpretation, you don't have that. You don't have entanglement inherently in it. So I wonder, is that an aspect of superiority of the Heisenberg approach? In other words, that he basically presage and thought about things like entanglement decades before it became fashionable as it is now. Yes, not because in the Schrodinger picture it cannot be done. Of course it can be done, because mathematics and their equivalent. Yes, yeah. But because the shredding of picture...

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sorry for the ringing phone. I'm not in my house. I cannot, I cannot control it. I hope somebody's going to answer. In the Schrodinger picture, the fascination, that the appeal of the shreddinger picture is because it's a function in space. And entanglement is that in reality is not a function in space because it has two legs in different points. So in a sense, shooting pictures try to hide it. And when you try to make it explicit

and make it details, you get too many worlds, you multiply the walls, you add a lot of stuff to reality. Well, in the Heisenberg way of viewing things, as you're saying, it's just relation and connection. And I think your analogy is very good

because I think it's the fact that reality is not properties of things, but it's connection between things, is a deep reason for which what counts in reality is the complexity. You know, combinatorial, it's something absolutely incredible, right? You know the fable of the king, to whom the wise men who invented Czech asked as a surprise to get one grain in the first and then two and then four and then, and like the king said, of course, it's easy. And then they do the calculation

and all the width of the empire were not sufficient for that. Why? Because when you do exponential, the number super greatly. So when you do combinatorics, number goes super greatly. And that's why reality is so complex around us.

That's why there are mountains and brain and animals and sea and wind and trees and galaxies. Out of what? out of electrons, new protons, a few quarks, just a bunch of things. How can it make so that? Complexity. Interactions. Networks.

That's what reality is. It's a network. It's a complexity. It's the richness of the way things combine themselves. Not how things are, but how they get together. That's so beautiful. And I think about that too. And I think about my friends that, you know, are more hermits and isolated.

Maybe they don't want families. Maybe they don't want to, you know, find a partner. I think, well, again, the number of connections, the combinatorics explodes faster than the cost increases. You know, in other words, if you have two kids and then you have three kids, you don't need another house. You can live in the same house, hopefully.

But the number of connections between the two of them and the three of them and all of you together, that grows exponentially fast, as you just pointed out. I think that's beautiful. And so I use that to advocate for bigger families, bigger friendships, and it doesn't even not to be biological. I feel connected to you as we're going to get into. Instead of fighting one another and say, oh, that country is becoming too powerful is our adversary or enemy. Let's make connections. It's better. Absolutely. And the more impressive, beautiful quantum device ever invented is our brain, right? Whatever's happening in our brain, which you touch upon in consciousness in this book,

I never like to give the end of the book away. But it is so beautifully written. It's such poetry as well. And I think that applies. You know, there's always an old joke that, and my colleagues will talk about, oh, we want to teach physics for poets. And I actually taught a class with a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Ray Ormond Trout, and she and I taught poetry for physicists because I think they need some of this. They need the Shakespeare. They need the tempest. They need to be the feeding of the soul for what else is there, as you say, too short the life.

And for me to think about, you know, what invest the quantum mechanical reality with meaning. It's the human connections. And so, therefore, I salute this wonderful book. called Helgeland, the story of one of the most delightful, mysterious episodes in cosmic history that led to a revolution in our understanding. Carlo, thank you for coming on to talk about this wonderful new book. Thank you very much. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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