Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsNot his best...
Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2021
PROS
1. Rovelli gives a visionary, almost spiritual, interpretation of quantum mechanics, while at the same time avoiding hazy idealism.
2. Who wouldn’t love a physicist who admits that: “I, too, once had long hair, tied with a red bandanna and sat cross-legged next to Allen Ginsberg chanting “Om”?
3. He uses literature, metaphor, history, science and philosophy to shed light on quantum mechanics.
4. Sometimes he's poetic and lyrical: “Watching what appears to be as solid as rock melt into air makes lighter, it seems to me, the transitory and bittersweet flowing of our lives."
5. He loves cats.
CONS
1. The book is advertised as being 252 pages (print edition). On my kindle, it was 203 pages, with the rest consisting of the acknowledgements and notes.
2. Speaking of cats, In every single one of the hundreds of versions of Schrodinger’s thought experiment I’ve read, the fate of this particular pussycat is a life and death matter. In fact, that’s the whole point: quantum mechanics isn’t trivial. Yet, in a misguided attempt to protect this poor (but altogether fictional) feline, Rovelli indulges in Disneyfication. He suggests that the choice is between an awake, although undoubtedly bored, animal and a gently snoozing one. He thereby totally undermines the significance of the choice. One star off for that offense alone.
Rovelli does something similar when elucidating entanglement. Photons don’t have color but, for the sake of simplifying the thought experiment, that’s the attribute he gives them. I’m sure that will confuse many readers.
3. If you already understood the double-slit experiment before reading Rovelli, you’ll recognize his particular version of it. If not, you may find his explanation confusing and muddled.
4. Did Rovelli really need to put in that long digression about Lenin and Bogdanev? Here’s a typical sentence: “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.” Tedious and mind-numbing.
5. Rovelli focuses on interactions and relationships. He says: “All objects are relational in nature.” He says: “Properties of an object (such as a chair) become manifest when the object interacts with others.” OK. He seems to be saying that the chair is nothing but a collection of properties. I agree that the chair is in some sense entangled with a mental perception of it. But can a blind rabbit just ignore the repercussions of jumping over an unmanifested (to him) cliff? Something is there, isn’t it?
6. The limitations of language seem to get in the way. Rovelli says that “The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist.” And yet he relies on “an external point of view” and on visualization to explain himself. He calls mind and matter “natural phenomena generated by complex structures of interactions.” A structure implies elements arranged in space. He says (on page 182 of the kindle edition): “The set of properties relative to the same object forms a perspective.” He refers to the electron as “a dotted manifestation of events, one here and another there.” These are all visual, spatial descriptions.
I basically agree with Rovelli. I just think he hasn’t totally grappled with all the implications of his ideas.
For a deeper dive into this topic read THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY by Bertrand Russell.
