Helgoland by Rovelli, Erica (ebook reader below 3000 .txt) 📗

more devastating than anything thousands of tons of TNT could produce—it is the very framework of reality as we knew it that has shattered.

There is something disorienting in all this. The solid basis of reality seems to melt between our fingers, in an infinite regression of references.

I stop writing these lines and look out of the window. There is still snow. Here in Canada, spring comes late. In my room there is a fire in the fireplace. I get up and add another log to it. I am writing about the nature of reality. I look into the fire and wonder which reality I am speaking about. This snow? This flickering fire? Or the reality which I’ve read about in books? Perhaps only the warmth from the fire reaching my skin, the nameless reddish-orange flickers, the tenuous whitish-blue of approaching twilight?

For a moment even these sensations melt. I close my eyes and see bright lakes of vivid color parting like curtains, through which I feel I am falling. Is this also reality? Violet and orange shapes are dancing, and I am no longer there.

I take a sip of tea. Stoke the fire. Smile. We navigate in an uncertain sea of colors and have at our disposal good maps with which to orient ourselves. But between our mental maps and reality there is the same distance as between the charts of sailors and the fury of the waves crashing against the cliffs, where the gulls hover and cry.

That fragile web, our mental organization, is little more than a clumsy tool for navigating through the infinite mysteries of this magical light-flooded kaleidoscope in which we are amazed to exist and that we call our world.

We can traverse it unquestioningly, with faith in the maps that we have; after all, they allow us to live pretty well. We can remain quiet, overwhelmed by the light and by the infinite beauty. We can sit patiently at a desk, light a candle or turn on a MacBook Air, go to the laboratories, discuss with friends and enemies, retire to a Sacred Island to calculate and to clamber across rocks at dawn; or drink a little tea, revive the flames in the fireplace and start to write again, trying to understand together a few more grains of truth, to pick up that mariners’ chart again and contribute to improving a bit of it. Once again, to rethink Nature.

PART THREE

V

THE UNAMBIGUOUS DESCRIPTION OF AN OBJECT INCLUDES THE OBJECTS TO WHICH IT MANIFESTS ITSELF

In which I ask what all of this means for our ideas about reality and realize that the conceptual novelty of the theory is not so new, after all.

ALEKSANDR BOGDANOV AND VLADIMIR LENIN

In 1909, four years after the failed Revolution of 1905 and eight years before the victorious October Revolution, Lenin, under the pseudonym “V. Il’in,” published Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, his most philosophical text.80 The implicit political target was Aleksandr Bogdanov, the cofounder and principal thinker of the Bolsheviks, until then Lenin’s friend and ally.81

In the years preceding the revolution, Bogdanov had published a work in three volumes offering a general theoretical basis for the revolutionary movement.82 It made reference to a philosophical perspective called “empiriocriticism.” Lenin had begun to see in Bogdanov a serious rival and had come to fear his ideological influence. In his own book, Lenin ferociously criticizes empiriocriticism as “reactionary philosophy,” and staunchly defends what he calls “materialism.”

“Empiriocriticism” was the name Ernst Mach had associated to his own ideas. Ernst Mach—remember him?—was the source of philosophical inspiration for both Einstein and Heisenberg.

Mach is not a systematic philosopher; his work at times lacks clarity. And yet I believe that the extent and depth of his influence on contemporary culture has been undervalued.83 Mach inspired the beginning of both of the great twentieth-century revolutions in physics: relativity and quantum theory. He played a direct role in the birth of the scientific study of perception. He was at the center of the politico-philosophical debate that led to the Russian Revolution. He had a determining influence on the founders of the Vienna Circle (the official name of which was Verein Ernst Mach, or the Ernst Mach Society), the philosophical environment that proved to be fertile ground for logical positivism, which directly inherits from Mach its “anti-metaphysical” rhetoric and is the root of so much contemporary philosophy of science. His direct influence reaches to American pragmatism, another root of today’s analytic philosophy.

Mach even made a mark on literature. One of the outstanding novelists of the twentieth century, Robert Musil, wrote his doctoral thesis on Mach’s work. The turbulent discussions engaged in by the protagonist of his first novel, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), revisit the themes of the thesis on the meaning of the scientific reading of the world. Musil’s major work, The Man without Qualities (1930–43), is also filigreed with such questions—from its very first page, which opens with a crafty double description, scientific and quotidian, of a sunny day.84

Mach’s influence on the revolution in physics was almost personal. An old friend of Wolfgang Pauli’s father, he was the godfather of the Pauli with whom Heisenberg would discuss philosophy. Einstein had, as a friend and fellow student in Zurich, Friedrich Adler, the son of a cofounder of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party and the promoter of a convergence of ideas between Mach and Marx. Adler would become leader of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party and, in protest against Austrian participation in the First World War, would later assassinate the country’s prime minister, Karl von Stürgkh. While in prison, Adler would write a book on the subject of . . . Ernst Mach.85

In short, Mach stands at a remarkable crossroads of science, politics, philosophy and literature. And some people still view the natural sciences, humanities and literature as unconnected!

Mach’s