Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics

As new thanks.

Quirky and page turning layman insight into Quantum Physics.

The history of the quantum pioneers and its origins is fascinating but the conclusions on the current state of quantum theories was rather weak and lacked insight compared to his other books. I guess to be fair, the point of the book is to describe the origin of quantum theories and the physicists behind it, and how those early ideas and theories were built upon and re-enforced, hence the title Helgoland as an allusion to those early days of quantum theory. And I have to admit I was quite drawn in by the descriptions of how some of the concepts and ideas were quite well established long before we had the the mathematics and equations of those early quantum physicists.

You would be forgiven for looking at this book and thinking it was a work of contemporary fiction, soon to be beloved of Guardian readers. But the title and cover of the book are a tad misleading as it is actually a brain-scrambling exploration of Werner Heisenberg’s quantum theory, up there with Stephen Hawking’s finest.“Helgoland” refers to the North Sea island where Heisenberg came up with his theory of the quantum universe during a period of self-isolation. Although the author doesn’t make any attempt to make some kind of metaphorical connection between the island and the subject matter, which is a bit odd. It’s just called Helgoland because that’s where the theory was formulated, and that’s it.At times the text gets very complicated, a fact that the author owns up to in the introduction and often acknowledges throughout the book. It goes deeply into concepts that are probably going to be beyond most people but it is written with a lightness of touch and is quite enjoyable in parts, especially in its descriptions of certain physicists’ quirks. (Who knew Schrodinger was such a lad ?) The book greatly benefits from being a fairly short, yet intense, read.This book can be enjoyed by the layman looking for something to get their mental teeth into, but in all honesty it will probably be best appreciated by those readers with a physics degree. Indeed, the author admits he wrote it for his physicist peers as well as the uninitiated. This book will no doubt fall into the same category as “A Brief History of Time” and be displayed on coffee tables by people who want to pretend to their friends that they understand it, or more likely ignored completely, which would be a shame.For my part, despite not having the necessary grounding, I enjoyed it, may indeed return to it one day and can even cautiously recommend it.

The slim volume is written with clarity, breadth of knowledge and vision, and closely knitted argumentsThe aim of the book is to provide the reader with an insight as to what quantum theory tells us about the nature of physical reality; a question that occupied the minds of physicists and philosophers since the discovery of the theory nearly one hundred years ago.On the other hand, quantum theory has been impressively successful both for its amazingly precise and predictive power and in forming the basis for our latest technology. The list of its achievements is very long indeed: quantum theory has been successfully applied to atoms, atomic nuclei, elementary particles, the physics of chemical bonds, the physics of solid, liquid and gas materials, semiconductors, lasers, nuclear power, the physics of the stars as the sun, neutron stars, the primordial universe, and the physics of the formation of galaxies.Quantum theory superseded classical theory which is continuous and deterministic while quantum theory is granular and probabilistic.At the heart of the relational interpretation of quantum theory which the author adopts, is that the theory does not describe the way in which quantum objects manifest themselves to us. It describes how every physical object manifests itself to any other physical object. How any physical entity acts on any other physical entity.Niels Bohr (one of the founders of quantum theory) speaks of the impossibility of neatly separating the behaviour of atomic systems from their interaction with the measuring device used to define the conditions under which the phenomenon appears. Revised in this way, Bohr's observation captures the discovery that forms the basis of the theory: the impossibility of separating the properties of an object from the interactions in which these properties manifest themselves and the objects to which they are manifested. The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions. Instead of seeing the physical world as a collection of objects with definite properties, quantum theory invites us to see the physical world as a net of relations. Objects are its nodes, there are no properties outside interactions.Viewed in terms of processes, events, in terms of relative properties, of a world of relations, the chasm between physical phenomena and mental phenomena is much less dramatic. It becomes possible to see both as natural phenomena generated by complex structures of interactions.The cosmos is interactions, life organizes relative information. We are a web of relations which, as far as we currently understand, reality is constituted.