Helgoland

What Hacker News says

1. katabasisFeb 2025
   I'm a fan of Carlo Rovelli's popular science books. "The Order of Time" in particular left a big impression on me. He is a philosopher as well as a scientist, and he has a gift for writing beautiful and accessible prose about some pretty heady topics.

   If you are interested in RQM but find this article somewhat dry, check out his short book "Helgoland".

   I find both RQM and Rovelli's notion of "thermal time" (i.e. the idea causality and entropy are emergent properties dependent on our perspective, as opposed to fundamental features of reality) to be very convincing.

   Show morethread
2. fidrelityJun 2024
   For anyone interested in other theories that were not mentioned and not satisfied with the unfalsifiability of Many Worlds I can recommend reading Carlo Rovelli's book Helgoland and his Relational Quantum Mechanics[0].

   [0]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-relational/

   thread
3. fidrelityFeb 2023
   Helgoland by Rovelli is probably my all-time favourite book. I have recently finished 'The beginning of infinity' by David Deutsch (another bestseller), another quantum physicist and was deeply disappointed.

   While Rovelli seems curious to me Deutsch seems certain about his conclusions. Did anyone have the same experience with those two authors that are seemingly talking about the same topics and are to some degree saying the same thing?

   Show morethread
4. PeterWhittakerSep 2022
   Rovelli’s work on relational QM suggests to me that superposition-as-real in the Copenhagen interpretation is false, a misunderstanding of how to incorporate the observer into the equation.

   Once the observer (or the affected system, same thing, in the end) is incorporated, a lot of the things about superposition that needed interpretation disappear.

   Read Helgoland for more.

   (My physics degree was a long time ago and my math is quite out of date. While Rovelli doesn’t discuss QC in the book, his take on what superposition is not has strong implications for QC AFAICT.)

   Show morethread
5. fordJul 2022
   This is pretty cool - quantum behavior is really not intuitive and being able to play with it helps clarify it

   I do wish each level had more explanation about the concept it's teaching. You can figure things out if you know a small amount about how quantum mechanics work (like knowing once you measure something the superposition collapses) but the game would be a better teaching tool if there were explanations before/after you complete a level

   For people interested in QM but without a physics/math background Carlo Rovelli has a book called Helgoland that explains a lot of the basics in a non-technical way

   Show morethread
6. PeterWhittakerJul 2022
   A few open books scattered through the house:

     Billion Dollar Spy, Hoffman (I’m kind of obsessed with Cold War espionage)
   
     SICP, JS edition (great read, I do a lot of JS work and I’ve learned a lot, despite time spent studying the language itself, and I’m still in the first chapter)
   
     Topoi, Goldblatt (tough read, but Category Theory calls to me)
   
     The Order of Time, Rovelli (his work is the clearest explication I’ve yet encountered of how QM might really be)
   
     Helgoland, Rovelli (ibid)

   Show morethread