Summary of Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview: #1 Heisenberg was the first to glimpse one of the most vertiginous of Nature's secrets, and he was twenty-three.

He was on the island of Helgoland to immerse himself in the problem with which he was obsessed: the strange behavior of the electrons in atoms.#2 In the summer of 1925, Heisenberg had the idea that would transform physics.

He believed that the most obvious assumptions can be wrong, and that knowledge should be based on observations alone.#3 Heisenberg's leap is as daring as it is simple.

He attempts to calculate the behavior of the electron using quantities that are observable, instead of the physical variables that were previously used.

He succeeds in giving up describing the electron's movement, and only describes what can be observed.#4 Heisenberg's new theory was very simple.

The forces were the same as in classical physics, but the variables were replaced by tables of numbers.

The equations were the same as those of classical physics, except for one equation that I will discuss later.