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

paper by Andrea Di Biagio and Carlo Rovelli titled “Relative Facts, Stable Facts,” https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.15543.

79. The central limit theorem. In its simplest version, it states that the fluctuation of the sum of N variables commonly grows as √N, and this implies a mean fluctuation in the order of √N/N which goes to zero for large N.V. THE UNAMBIGUOUS DESCRIPTION OF AN OBJECT INCLUDES THE OBJECTS TO WHICH IT MANIFESTS ITSELFAleksandr Bogdanov and Vladimir Lenin

80. V. Il’in, Materializm i empiriokriticizm (Moscow: Zveno, 1909); translated as V. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio Criticism: Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, vol. 13 (Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing, 2011).

81. See for instance (although I disagree with some of its conclusions) David Bakhurst, “On Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism,” Studies in East European Thought 70 (2018), 107–19, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-018-9303-7, and references therein.

82. A. Bogdanov, Empiriomonizm: Stat’i po filosofi (Moscow and St. Petersburg: S. Dorovatovskij and A. Čarušnikov, 1904–06); translated by David Rowley as Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Books 1–3 (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

83. An acute summary of Mach’s ideas and an interesting reevaluation of his thought can be found in Erik C. Banks, The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

84. “A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising and setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapor in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it was a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.” Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (1930–43), trans. Sophie Wilkins (London: Picador, 1995).

85. Friedrich Adler, Ernst Machs Überwindung des mechanischen Materialismus (Vienna: Brand, 1918).

86. Ernst Mach, Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung historischkritisch dargestellt (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1883).

87. Banks, The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James and Russell.

88. Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind (London and New York: Allen & Unwin/Macmillan, 1921), 10.

89. Aleksandr Bogdanov, “Vera i nauka O knige V. Il’ina Materializm i empiriokriticizm,” in Padenie velikogo fetišma (Sovremnnyj krizis ideologi) [The Fall of a Great Fetishism (The Contemporary Ideological Crisis)], (Moscow: S. Dorovatovskij and A. Čarušnikov, 1910). A detailed discussion of Mach’s ideas is found in Aleksandr Bogdanov, Priključenija odnoj filosofskoj školy (St. Petersburg: Znanie, 1908). Works of Bogdanov translated into English can be found at https://www.marxists.org/archive/bogdanov/index.htm. See a full bibliography at https://monoskop.org/Alexander_Bogdanov#Links.

90. Popper also badly misreads Mach along similar lines: Karl Popper, “A Note on Berkeley as Precursor of Mach and Einstein,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 4 (1953), 26–36.

91. “The only property of matter to which the philosophical position of materialism is linked is that of being an objective reality, of existing outside of our minds.” Lenin, Materialism and Empirio Criticism, chap. 5.

92. Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics, trans. Thomas J. McCormack (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1960), 559.

93. And if that is not enough, reread the footnote to paragraph 4.9 of Mach, The Science of Mechanics (589–90): it seems like a diligent explanation by a good student of the idea that forms the basis of Einstein’s general relativity. Except that it was written in 1883 . . . thirty-two years before Einstein published his theory.

94. Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 517; David Bakhurst, “On Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism.” Studies in East European Thought 70 (2018), 107–19.

95. Douglas W. Huestis, “The Life and Death of Alexander Bogdanov, Physician,” Journal of Medical Biography 4 (1996), 141–47.

96. Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, “Bogdanov’s Autobiography,” from Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Books 1–3, trans. David Rowley (Leiden: Brill, 2019), https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004300323/front-7.xml.

97. Bakhurst, “On Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism.”

98. Wu Ming, Proletkult (Turin: Einaudi, 2018); Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars (New York: Spectra, 1993–96).Naturalism without Substance: Contextuality

99. Douglas Adams, speech given at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge, UK, September 1998, http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/index.html [inactive]. Found also in The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (New York: Del Rey, 2005).

100. For example, his response to Einstein’s objection when presented with the ideal experiment of the light box is wrong. Bohr invokes general relativity, but this has nothing to do with the question, which is about an entanglement between two distant objects.

101. Niels Bohr, The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1998), vol. 4, 11.

102. Mauro Dorato, “Bohr Meets Rovelli: A Dispositionalist Account of the Quantum Limits of Knowledge,” Quantum Studies: Mathematics and Foundations 7 (2020), 133–45, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40509-020-00220-y.

103. For Aristotle the relation is a property of the substance. It is the property of substance that refers to something else (Categories, 7, 6a36–7). Among all the categories, for Aristotle, relationality is the one that has “least being and reality” (Metaphysics, 14, 1, 1088a22–4 and 30–35). Can we think differently?Without Foundation? Nāgārjuna

104. Carlo Rovelli, “Relational Quantum Mechanics,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 35 (1996), 1637–78, https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9609002; and the entry “Relational Quantum Mechanics” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta, at plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/qm-relational/.

105. Bas C. van Fraassen, “Rovelli’s World,” Foundations of Physics 40 (2010), 390–417, https://www.princeton.edu/~fraassen/abstract/Rovelli_sWorld-FIN.pdf.

106. Michel Bitbol, De l’intérieur du monde: Pour une philosophie et une science des relations (Paris: Flammarion, 2010). Relational quantum mechanics is discussed in the second chapter.

107. François-Igor Pris, “Carlo Rovelli’s Quantum Mechanics and Contextual Realism,” Bulletin of Chelyabinsk State University 8 (2019), 102–7; Pierre Livet, “Processus et connexion,” in Le renouveau de la métaphysique, ed. S. Berlioz, F. Drapeau Contim and F. Loth (Paris: Vrin, 2020).

108. Mauro Dorato, “Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics, Anti-Monism, and Quantum Becoming,” in The Metaphysics of Relations, ed. A.