Often heavy going, but a thoughtful argument that “all nature is quantum” and that we should go with the flow.
The theoretical physicist and bestselling author digs into his discipline’s most confounding concept.
As lucidly as he can, Rovelli shows that while quantum theory may clarify the foundations of science, it doesn’t make sense. “Its mathematics does not describe reality,” he writes. “Distant objects seem magically connected. Matter is replaced by ghostly waves of probability.” And yet, it “has never been found wrong.” The author begins with the easy part: the history. Helgoland is a barren island in the North Sea where, in 1925, a young Werner Heisenberg spent the summer trying to explain how electrons behave. The 20-year-old explanation that atoms consisted of tiny electrons whirling around heavier protons—as planets orbit the sun—didn’t work. Electrons don’t whirl like specks of matter but rather in diffuse, cloudlike waves. However, whenever scientists deal with an electron (such as in a particle accelerator), it becomes a speck of matter. After much agonizing, Heisenberg decided not to explain electron behavior but simply describe what happens. The result was a brilliant, if clunky, formulation using mathematical matrixes that correctly predicted what experiments showed. Within a few years, other geniuses (Schrödinger, Pauli, Dirac, Born) refined and simplified Heisenberg’s work, and quantum theory was off and running. After 100 years, scientists still agree that quantum theory remains an enigma, but it works so well that only a persistent minority, Rovelli included, try to make sense of it. In the book’s second half, more philosophy than science, the author maintains that every entity in the universe, from protons to humans, exists only in relation to other objects. Something that didn’t interact would be invisible. Expressing doubt over Ernst Mach’s insistence that science must be based on the “observable,” Rovelli leans toward the Buddhist teaching that “there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else.”
Often heavy going, but a thoughtful argument that “all nature is quantum” and that we should go with the flow.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-32888-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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