While we scientists know how to use it to make all those digital devices, we do not know what it means. We don't know what it's telling us about the fundamental nature of reality. It is into that chasm that acclaimed theoretical physicist and author Carlo Rovelli leaps with his new book ... For Carlo Rovelli the radical uncertainty forced on us by quantum mechanics holds an equally radical lesson about how wrong we have been about the nature of the universe. Rovelli is one of the worlds' leading theoretical physicists ...What Rovelli offers in this new book is an interpretation of quantum mechanics ... Rovelli has developed his own relational interpretation — and Helgoland represents a clear and yet poetic argument for its vision ... I found Rovelli's perspective to be both bracing and refreshing. Without diving off the deep end into New Age fuzz or forcing a previous philosophical bias down quantum mechanics' throat, he sees its questions as a challenge to invent and investigate radical possibilities ... Helgoland is not, however, a book to learn quantum mechanics from. Rovelli's description of superposition is sparse and gives readers only what they need to know. His descriptions of the other interpretations are also thin and sometimes misleading ... Instead Rovelli is offering a new way to understand not just the world but our place in it, too.

A remarkably wide-ranging new meditation on quantum theory ... Rovelli reveals that he is not afraid to mix quantum physics and eastern philosophy, something that others have done in the past with little success and some derision. It says much about him and his argument that he is not so easily dismissed ... It’s a perspective that Rovelli believes makes it easier to think about the quantum world. He may be right, but the words of Niels Bohr still come to mind: 'Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.'

.... an argument that nothing we see and experience actually exists. Just as the rainbow is a manifestation of the angle between you, some water droplets in the sky, and the sun, Rovelli tells us that the atoms, electrons, photons of light and other stuff of the universe manifest only in their interactions with each other ... Rovelli doesn’t really push things much further than that; you won’t come away from Helgoland with a sense that you finally understand the true nature of reality. He doesn’t explain, for instance, what it is that is doing the interacting, if the entities are nothing but their interactions. But it is a pleasure to travel in his company regardless.

... his most beautiful yet ... The book’s principal theme is that reality as we think we know it does not really exist ... This basically is how evolution has constructed reality for human beings: a useful system of icons and symbols to help us to navigate the complex truth underneath. The words and ideas we use to think about those symbols are not especially helpful to describe reality. And, this being the lighthearted book review that it is, that leads us to the minor issue of . . . what is reality? ... reality as we have traditionally conceived of it does not exist ... Reality is relational. Nothing exists except in relation to something else. Logically this is not hard to grasp ... This may sound gorgeously esoteric but, as Rovelli insists, it is the best idea we have of the actual real world we live in.

... Rovelli tackles both the quantum realm and the ways it helps us make sense of the mind with refreshing clarity and without hand-wavy mystery-mongering ... Rovelli’s writing, translated from Italian by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, is simultaneously assured and humble. His erudition is evident, especially in his delightfully long segues into the kindred philosophies of Ernst Mach, Alexander Bogdanov (an early Bolshevik) and Nagarjuna ... poetic and spare. Readers unfamiliar with quantum physics may struggle to get its full import. To use his theory as a metaphor, Rovelli’s lyricism may depend on how many other, possibly plodding, nitty-gritty accounts of quantum physics one may have read: The more that number, the more Helgoland will seem a poem.

... brief but potentially momentous ... Mr. Rovelli follows the trail of quantum theory through some delightfully unorthodox byways ... For all his delicacy of touch, Mr. Rovelli is a man, and a scientist, of large ambition. It is time, he declares, to bring the relational theory into general discussion, 'beyond the restricted circles of theoretical physicists and philosophers, to deposit its distilled honey, sweet and intoxicating, into the whole of contemporary culture.' As he might say himself, Wow.

These are big ideas, but Rovelli easily leads readers through the knotty logic, often with lyricism: 'The courage to radically reinvent the world: this was the subtle fascination of science that first captivated me as a rebellious adolescent.' Readers who follow along will be left in awe.

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 ... 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 ... Often heavy going, but a thoughtful argument that 'all nature is quantum' and that we should go with the flow.