display all the ideas for this combination of texts
9 ideas
20462 | Because it is quantised, a field behaves like a set of packets of energy [Rovelli] |
Full Idea: Since the energy of the electromagnetic field can take on only certain values, the field behaves like a set of packets of energy. | |
From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) |
20463 | There are about fifteen particles fields, plus a few force fields [Rovelli] |
Full Idea: There are about fifteen fields, whose quanta are elementary particles (electrons, quarks, muons, neutrinos, Higgs, and little else), plus a few fields similar to the electromagnetic one, which describe forces at a nuclear scale, with quanta like photons. | |
From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) | |
A reaction: According to Rovelli, this sentence describes the essence of physical reality. |
20464 | The world consists of quantum fields, with elementary events happening in spacetime [Rovelli] |
Full Idea: The world is not made up of fields and particles, but of a single type of entity: the quantum field. There are no longer particles which move in space with the passage of time, but quantum fields whose elementary events happen in spacetime. | |
From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) | |
A reaction: If you are not a scientist, there is (I find) a strong tendency to read and digest stuff like this, and then forget it the next day, because it so far from our experience. Folk like me have to develop two parallel views of the nature of reality. |
20460 | Electrons are not waves, because their collisions are at a point, and not spread out [Rovelli] |
Full Idea: Schrödinger's wave is a bad image for an electron, because when a particle collides with something else, it is always at a point: it is never spread out in space like a wave. | |
From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04 note) | |
A reaction: And yet there is the diffusion in the two-slit experiment, which Thomas Young discovered for light. I must take Rovelli's word for this. |
20459 | Electrons only exist when they interact, and their being is their combination of quantum leaps [Rovelli] |
Full Idea: Electrons don't always exist. They exist when they interact. They materialize when they collide with something. The quantum leap from one orbit to another constitutes their way of being real. An electron is a combination of leaps between interactions. | |
From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) | |
A reaction: If a philosopher with an Aristotelian interest in the nature of matter wants to grasp the modern view, the electron looks like the thing to focus on. You can feel Rovelli battling here to find formulations that might satisfy a philosopher. |
20466 | Quantum Theory describes events and possible interactions - not how things are [Rovelli] |
Full Idea: Quantum Theory does not describe things as they are: it describes how things occur and interact with each other. It doesn't describe where there is a particle but how it shows itself to others. The world of existence is reduced to possible interactions. | |
From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) | |
A reaction: Fans of 'process philosophy' should like this, though he is not denying that there may be facts about how things are - it is just that this is not mentioned in the theory. There is not much point in philosophers yearning to know the reality. |
20465 | Nature has three aspects: granularity, indeterminacy, and relations [Rovelli] |
Full Idea: I think that quantum mechanics has revealed three aspects of the nature of things: granularity, indeterminacy, and the relational structure of the world. | |
From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 04) |
20458 | The world is just particles plus fields; space is the gravitational field [Rovelli] |
Full Idea: The world is made up of particles + fields, and nothing else; there is no need to add space as an extra ingredient. Newton's space is the gravitational field. | |
From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 03) | |
A reaction: I get the impression that particles are just bumps or waves in the fields [yes! Rovelli p.110], which would mean there are fields and nothing else. And no one seems to know what a field is. |
20470 | Only heat distinguishes past from future [Rovelli] |
Full Idea: It is always heat and only heat that distinguishes the past from the future. | |
From: Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems [2014], 12) | |
A reaction: I can remember the past but not the future - so can that fact be reduced to facts about heat? |