Helgoland

I didn’t so much read this book as inhale it. Rovelli’s writing is always highly readable, and this one is no exception. The book tells the dramatic story of the origin of quantum mechanics, beginning with a holiday spent on the windswept island of Helgoland by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s.

Rovelli introduces the history of the core ideas of quantum mechanics with great clarity and provides an interesting new way of interpreting quantum weirdness that I found fascinating. 

Rovelli is one of the leading physicists in the world… and he writes like a novelist.

In Helgoland Rovelli tells the riveting story of the invention of quantum mechanics, while also explaining quantum mechanics—no mean feat! His book is at once a primer on the most important discovery of modern physics and a philosophical reflection on what that discovery tells us about ourselves, our knowledge, and the nature of the universe itself. 

Carlo Rovelli is affectionately known as the “poet of modern physics,” and Helgoland does not disappoint in this regard. Don’t be fooled by the name, this book is about the deep concepts of quantum physics and the story of the scientists behind them.

Helgoland refers to the barren, windswept island off the North Sea coast of Germany, where the 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg, physicist, and chronic hay-fever sufferer, retreated in June 1925 to try and make sense of the Alice in Wonderland world which atomic experiments had revealed beneath the skin of reality. The mind-bending submicroscopic realm was a place where a single item could be in two places at once; where events happened for no reason at all; and where atoms could influence each other instantaneously even if on opposite sides of the Universe.

Heisenberg’s lightbulb moment on Helgoland is only a minor… show more.