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

In the words of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Hippolyte Taine, we can say that “external perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling ‘hallucination’ a false perception, we must call external perception ‘a confirmed hallucination.’”134

Science, we may say, is only an extension of the way in which we see: we seek out discrepancies between what we expect and what we gather from the world. We have visions of the world, and if they don’t work, we change them. The whole of human knowledge is constructed in this way.

Vision happens inside the brain of each of us in fractions of seconds. The growth of knowledge happens slowly, in the dense dialogue of the whole of humanity over years, decades, centuries. The first relates to the individual organization of experience and belongs to the neuronal and psychological realms. The second relates to the social organization of experience that founds the physical order described by science. (Bogdanov: “The difference between the psychological and physical orders boils down to the difference between experience organized individually and experience organized socially.”135) But it is the same thing: we update and improve our mental maps of reality, our conceptual structure, to take into account the discrepancies we have observed between the ideas that we have and what comes to us, and hence to better and better decipher reality.136

Sometimes it’s a detail: we learn some new fact. Sometimes we put into question the very conceptual grammar of our way of conceiving the world. We update our deepest image of the world. We discover new maps for thinking about reality that describe the world to us a little more accurately.

This is quantum theory.

There is, of course, something bewildering about the vision of the world that emerges from this theory. We must abandon something that seemed most natural to us: the simple idea of a world made of things. We recognize it as an old prejudice, an old vehicle that we no longer have any use for.

Something of the solidity of the world seems to melt into air, like the iridescent and purplish colors of a psychedelic experience. It leaves us stunned, like the words of Prospero in the epigraph to this chapter: “And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve, / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.”

This is the ending of The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last work, one of the most moving passages in the history of literature. After taking us on such a flight of imagination, taking us temporarily outside ourselves, Prospero/Shakespeare comforts us for looking “in a moved sort” and “as if you were dismay’d”: “Be cheerful . . . / Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air.” Only to then softly dissolve into that immortal whisper: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.”

This is how I feel, at the end of this long meditation on quantum physics. The solidity of the physical world seems to have melted into thin air, like Prospero’s cloud-capp’d towers and gorgeous palaces. Reality has broken up into a play of mirrors.

And yet we are not talking about the sumptuous imagination of the Bard and his incursions into the hearts of humans. We are not dealing with the latest crazy speculation of some overimaginative theoretical physicist, either. It is the patient, rational, empirical, rigorous research of fundamental physics that has brought about this dissolving of substantiality. It is the best science that humanity has found to date, the basis of modern technology, whose reliability is beyond doubt.

I think it is time to take this theory fully on board, for its nature to be discussed beyond the restricted circles of theoretical physicists and philosophers, to deposit its distilled honey, sweet and intoxicating, into the whole of contemporary culture.*

I hope that what I have written may contribute to this.

The best description of reality that we have found is in terms of events that weave a web of interactions. “Entities” are nothing other than ephemeral nodes in this web. Their properties are not determined until the moment of these interactions; they exist only in relation to something else. Everything is what it is only with respect to something else.

Every vision is partial. There is no way of seeing reality that is not dependent on a perspective—no point of view that is absolute and universal.

And yet, points of view communicate. Knowledge is in dialogue with itself and with reality. In the dialogue, those points of view modify, enrich, converge—and our understanding of reality deepens.

The actor of this process is not a subject distinct from phenomenal reality, outside it, nor any transcendent point of view; it is a portion of that reality itself. Natural selection has taught it to make use of useful correlations: meaningful information. Our discourse on reality is itself part of that reality. Relations make up our “I,” as our society, our cultural, spiritual and political life.

It is for this reason, I think, that everything we have been able to accomplish over the centuries has been achieved in a network of exchanges, collaborating. This is why the politics of collaboration is so much more sensible and effective than the politics of competition . . .

It is for this reason as well, I believe, that the very idea of an individual “I”—that solitary and rebellious “I” that led me to the unbridled questions of my youth, that self that I believed to be completely independent and totally free . . . recognizes itself, in the end, as only a ripple in a network of networks . . .

The questions that led me, so many years ago, to the study of physics