Helgoland by Rovelli, Erica (story read aloud txt) 📕

Thanks to the promotion of his father (who was not an idiot) to a position teaching physics in a city with larger schools, young Aleksandr has access to a library and a rudimentary physics lab. He gets a scholarship to attend high school, about which he would later write that “the mental closure and the malice of the professors taught me to be wary of the powers that be, and to resist all authority.”96 The same visceral dislike of authority guided the development of his slightly younger contemporary Albert Einstein.

Having graduated brilliantly from school, Bogdanov enrolls at Moscow University to study natural sciences. He joins a student organization that helps comrades from distant provinces. He becomes involved in political activities. He is arrested multiple times. He contributes to the publication of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Mach’s Analysis of Sensations in Russia. He works in political propaganda, writes popularizing texts on economics for the workers. He studies medicine in Ukraine, gets arrested again and exiled. In Zurich he becomes acquainted with Lenin. He is a leader of the Bolshevik movement, something like Lenin’s deputy leader, in fact. In the following years, after the arguments with Lenin, he becomes distanced from the leadership, and after the revolution is kept at a distance from the centers of power. He remains universally respected and continues to exert a strong cultural, moral and political influence. In the 1920s and 1930s, he is a reference point for the underground “left-wing” opposition that seeks to defend the successes of the revolution from Bolshevik autocracy, until this dissidence is crushed by Stalin.

The key concept of Bogdanov’s theoretical work is the notion of organization. Social life is the organization of collective work. Knowledge is the organization of experience and of concepts. It is possible to understand the whole of reality as organization, structure. The picture of the world that Bogdanov proposes is based on a spectrum of kinds of organization that become gradually more complex: from minimal elements that interact directly, through the organization of matter in the living, the biological development of individual experience organized in individuals, up to scientific knowledge, which, for Bogdanov, is collectively organized experience. Through the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener and the system theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, these ideas will have a little-recognized but profound influence on modern thought, on the birth of cybernetics, on the science of complex systems, down to contemporary structural realism.

In Soviet Russia, Bogdanov becomes a professor of economics at Moscow University, directs the Communist Academy and republishes his early sci-fi novel Red Star, which becomes a huge publishing success. The novel describes a utopian, libertarian society on Mars that has overcome all distinctions between men and women and that uses an efficient statistical apparatus for processing economic data that can indicate to industries exactly what needs to be produced, and to the unemployed precisely in which factories to seek work, and so on, leaving everyone the freedom to choose how they should live.

Bogdanov focuses on organizing centers for proletarian culture, where a novel culture, based on collaboration, mutually supportive rather than competitive, can flower autonomously. Moved on from this activity by Lenin, he devotes himself to medicine. A doctor by training, he had served as such at the front during the First World War. He founds an institute for medical research in Moscow and becomes one of the pioneers of blood transfusion. In his revolutionary and collectivist ideology, the transfusion of blood is symbolic of the potential for men and women to collaborate and share.

A doctor, an economist, a philosopher, a natural scientist, a science-fiction novelist, a poet, teacher, politician, progenitor of cybernetics and of the science of organization, a pioneer of blood transfusion and a lifelong revolutionary, Aleksandr Bogdanov, prodigiously talented,97 is one of the most complex and fascinating figures of the intellectual world at the beginning of the twentieth century. His ideas, too radical for both sides of the Iron Curtain, have spread slowly, in a subterranean way. Only very recently has the three-volume work that gave rise to Lenin’s critique been published in English translation. Curiously, we find more traces of Bogdanov in literary works: as the inspiration for the novel Proletkult by Wu Ming, and for the great character Arkady Bogdanov in Kim Stanley Robinson’s delightful trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars.98

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

Right up until the end, the courage to experiment, the courage to exchange and share, the dream—and the practice—of brotherhood.

NATURALISM WITHOUT SUBSTANCE: CONTEXTUALITY

I have digressed. But it is the perspective provided by Mach that allowed Heisenberg to take his crucial step, and the polemic between Lenin and Bogdanov highlights the issue that generates misunderstandings around quantum theory.

The “anti-metaphysical” spirit that Mach promoted is an attitude of openness: We should not seek to teach the world how it should be. Let’s listen to the world instead, in order to learn from it how to think about it.

When Einstein objected to quantum mechanics by remarking that “God does not play dice,” Bohr responded by admonishing him, “Stop telling God what to do.” Which means: Nature is richer than our metaphysical prejudices. It has more imagination than we do.

One of the most acute philosophers to have examined quantum theory, David Albert, once asked me: “Carlo, how can you think that experiments in a laboratory made with little bits of metal and glass can have such significance as to put into question our most rooted metaphysical convictions about how the world works?” The question has haunted me ever since. But in the end the answer seems simple to me: “What are these ‘most rooted metaphysical convictions’ of ours, if not what we have become accustomed to believe precisely by handling stones and pieces of wood?”

Our prejudices concerning how reality