8 Questions with Theoretical Physicist Carlo Rovelli —Including Quantum, Cats and Why We Should Forget About Time

The United Kingdom didn’t think much about particles or waves or quantum nonsense when it blew up Helgoland in 1947. It only knew that there were thousands of tons of World War II armaments to dispose of and the little island in the North Sea made a perfect place. The explosion was the largest non-nuclear blast of its time, and it came just 22 years after a much smaller, quieter detonation took place on the same island—when a young German physicist named Werner Heisenberg completed the equations that provided humanity’s first glimpse into the hallucinatory world of quantum physics. Close to a century later, that early revelation is being explained with uncanny insight and lyrical grace by best-selling author and theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his latest book, aptly named Helgoland. Rovelli explores such head-spinning notions as the reason observing an event determines its outcome, why time doesn’t really exist, and how it feels to devote your life to a science that even Albert Einstein described as “witchery.” You write that you never would have been a physicist except that when you were registering for college classes, the line at the physics desk was shortest. Is that really the way you picked the discipline that would define your life? Not entirely. I had a restless youth; I did not even want to go to the university. I wanted to take my backpack and go wandering around the world. But what happened is that I had a little Italian...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news