Quantum Relations

When I got my first iPhone -- the iPhone 4 circa 2010-- one of the ways I devised to increase my time with it was reading iBooks.   My Motorola Razr had died just as I was being courted by a new firm at the lowest ebb of my time at the old one, and somehow I managed to snag the new job without the use of any mobile device just through the clever use of my personal voice mail which I was able to access from my work phone.   The new job was a welcome change after 20 years of slow decay into depressing nothingness at my old firm.  I had gone from sharing an interior closet with 3 others in a flavorless block downtown to my own office with a door and a window in what was formerly a TV station situated in a pleasant neighborhood on a hill overlooking the city across the street from my favorite deli.  I had gone from looking forward to nothing but retirement if I didn't die first to a brand new beginning full of hope and opportunities to engage my intelligence and creativity for gainful employment.  The iPhone was a treat to myself in keeping with the new era of possibility.

I was in the habit of carrying around books for my daily commute at the time, so being able to carry them in my pocket was a revelation and a revolution in my habits.  iBook "pages" turned much more like the pages of a book at the time adding to the delight.  It was somehow appropriate that the first books I tried on the phone were the works of Bertrand Russell whom I'd never read before, but whose very name evoked my first encounters with the giants of the Twentieth Century on the spines of books in my oldest brothers' burgeoning collection of college texts when I was undergoing puberty around the time of Richard Nixon's curtailed second term.  I picked Russell because his titles were in free editions, but it didn't hurt that he was an engaging writer with a surprising sense of humor and a style and outlook as fresh as a spring morning 100 years later.  Reading Russell was like a communion with my younger self, with the state of the world before Reagan and Thatcher got their vampiric fangs on the life of it just as I was entering adulthood, an adulthood that has been oxygen deprived ever since (along with the rest of us-- even those of us too young or too braindead from the encounter with neoliberalism to know what we were missing).

Recently, I've been re-experiencing that sense of revival with another eBook.  This one is by the Italian theoretical physicist and science writer Carlo Rovelli and it's his short 2020 book for non-physicists on the question of how to conceive of quantum dynamics, Helgoland, so named for the Danish/German archipelago in the North Sea where Werner Heisenberg on a working visit had the brainstorm that led to the development of Quantum Mechanics.   Rovelli is a notable scientist himself as the co-developer with Lee Smolin and Abhay Ashketar of the theory of loop quantum gravity.  He's also a gifted writer; and Helgoland is full of lively gossip about Heisenberg and the contemporaries and influencers who charted the way for scientists, philosophers, political figures, artists like Niels Bohr,  Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Alexander Bogdanov,  Carl Jung,  Pablo Picasso-- and others into the strange, often paradoxical mysteries of a reality based on quantum science apart from the safety of materialism and classical physics.

Chronicling his own experience building a foundation of understanding of quantum mechanics which he has characterized as Relational, Rovelli discusses such unexpected byways along the way as the writings of 2nd century Buddhist Abbott, Nagarjuna, author of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way), and the political dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov over whether quantum mechanics was revolutionary enough.  Bogdanov argued that Comrade Lenin's impulse to purge science of uncertainty that did not fit with a materialist understanding of history was itself counterrevolutionary if it denied how the cosmos worked.   On the contrary, the new understanding of physics, dependent as it was on acknowledging the equality of all perspectives in understanding Nature was itself supportive of the upheaval of classical structures that Lenin's revolution represented.  

In the end, Lenin's adherence to classical materialism won (and maybe contributed to the finitude of the era of actually existing socialism).  But Bogdanov is featured prominently in Rovelli’s Acknowledgements, with a photograph, right next to Heisenberg whose anecdote is the basis for the title of the book. In the course of explaining his belief that subjective reality is actually not “a problem” for a scientific understanding of consciousness, but rather an indicative example of what quantum mechanics teaches us about the fundamental importance of the relations of objects to each other in the scheme of how the cosmos works—as in crucial and wholly in keeping with quantum mechanics’ discovery of how matter comes about and behaves  (think Schrodinger’s cat and Uncertainty and Entanglement and the importance of the observation to the measurement and for that matter General Relativity—the connecting tissue being that nothing is “real” except in relation to every other thing), Rovelli tosses out a brutally to the point quote from Bogdanov:  

The individual is a bourgeois fetish.

Rovelli himself puts it this way:  

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 . . . [ellipses Rovelli’s]

Reading Helgoland was for me a deep and beautiful experience.