CARLO ROVELLI ON HELGOLAND
Carlo Rovelli
Carlo Rovelli is an author who has broken the barriers of knowledge. For decades the Arts and the Sciences have developed in their separate silos – despite brave sorties from Stephen Hawking and his best selling works . Intriguing therefore that an aristocrat of the world of literature Dame Gillian Beer bravely took on the doyen of esoteric scientific adventurers, Carlo Rovelli in an event aimed at illumination for all.
For writers on the arts, science has ever been a land of mysterious attraction, but few are prepared for the jaw dropping concepts that theoretical physicists deal in. I recall an interview in Cambridge with Professor Hawking around the Hadron Collider’s big moment when a journalist friend jauntily asked what would happen. “Well it might be an interesting experiment - or the total destruction of the whole of creation “ he declared calmly .
Rovelli explained that discovery in quantum physics means literally that, quanta steps or waves towards understanding. “
‘We have to adopt a discrete approach, we cannot have a God-like overview’ Professor Beer agreed- but how to do it, “Eddington remarks that the problem we have with language (to describe physical events) is that it doesn’t have enough tenses as there are in mathematics’. Professor Rovelli agreed ”Our conceptual structure needs to adapt. Our knowledge is like a boat always changing , we cannot get out, we must change it from within. Even if you don’t have the words to say it ”
And of course we met up with Schrodinger’s famous cat, the one in the box, dead and alive at the same time. ” The Cat is not dead but is asleep coming from sleep to wakefulness,” Rovelli suggested. Which is possibly where the metaphor itself runs out of meaning. Already famous for his books Seven Brief Lessons in Physics and The Order of Time, Helgoland is Rovellis’s new work. In it, he explains the mysteries of the quantum within the story of the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg who, in 1925, found himself in a treeless, wind-battered island in the North Sea, Helgoland or Heligoland as the BBC Shipping Report had it. Here it was that he had the concept behind quantum mechanics. A century later, his theory is fiercely debated.
Ambitious and stimulating, this was a discussion the Festival should be proud of ; two immense intellects moving towards a real illumination of some of the most complex ideas in modern science, one from the Arts and the other from the coal face of cutting edge research. The discussio was worthy of the scope of the Cambridge Literary Festival – and a credit to the interpretive brilliance of Cambridge University’s Dame Gillian Beer – and her intrepid interlocutor from in the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille, Carlo Rovelli.
The Cambridge Literary Festival continues until May 2nd - and Copenhagen is slated for the Cambridge Arts Theatre in its new season
