Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli guides us through the extraordinary story of quantum physics, its key ideas, the debates it raises and his own contribution to making sense of the quantum.

Rovelli’s new book Helogoland opens a century ago on a treeless windswept island in the North Sea, where the young Werner Heisenberg, aged just 23, had retreated to think. This is the story of the bright young men who together with Heisenberg completed the theory of quantum mechanics and were to become some of science’s most famous Nobel-Prize winners. Their science has given us modern technology, yet it remains enigmatic, swarming with startling ideas such as ghostly waves, distant objects seemly magically connected to each other, and cats that are both asleep and awake.

Drawing on a lifetime of reading across the sciences and the arts, philosophy and neuroscience, Rovelli guides us through the far-reaching general implications of thinking of reality as a vast network of relations, of which we ourselves are just a component. The great scientific discoveries have remade the structure of the world in our imagination. Now, a century on from the discovery of quantum theory, Rovelli helps us to truly understand the world we live in.

In conversation with James Ladyman, University of Bristol.

Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland is published by Allen Lane. Buy a copy from Waterstones, our bookselling partners.

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Festival of Ideas: Carlo Rovelli, How Does the Quantum Help Us Understand the World?