Helgoland

The title and context of this beautifully written book evoke the wild landscape of the barren island of Helgoland where Heisenberg had gone to reflect on the state of quantum theory, and there he reached his fundamental realisation of interaction and connectedness. Rovelli takes this story forward with his own work on relationality and contextuality, where the world is 'a fabric woven by relations' rather than a collection of objects or substances: everything exists only in relation to something else – including scientists and their instruments - while process become central. In this respect, I found the omission of any reference to Whitehead curious, and the author could also have drawn on participatory research as another perspective.

Ernst Mach tried to banish metaphysics from science in favour of relations between observable quantities where sensation is equally physical and mental (William James wrote about this), but doing away with metaphysics is in fact mission impossible. It is not in fact a question of 'adapting our philosophy to our science' but rather to recognise that philosophy, logic and language underlie the very articulation of thought and theory. Rovelli makes an interesting comparison with the work of the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, with his ideas on co-dependent arising where nothing exists independently in itself – this is 'independence without autonomous essence' grounded in impermanence and nothingness.

The last part of the book is an expression of naturalism and consilience in the E.O. Wilson sense but based on quantum mechanics. The author rejects the extension of concepts such as entanglement into other fields and is dismissive with respect to pan-psychism, asserting that 'all the evidence suggests that without [the complex elaboration of information that occurs in our brains] we have no mental life. Like many mainstream writers, he has evidently failed to consider the wider evidence base. His position is one of the Popper and Eccles' promissory materialism that the workings of the brain 'will probably be clarified sooner or later.' The next chapter elaborates a physical explanation of meaning as relative relevant information within a web of correlations – I find David Bohm's approach more satisfying in this regard. There is then a tension between his notion of entity that includes animals, humans and machines and the primacy of process and relations where the world is known from within it. Here there are some stimulating reflections, since in his scheme there is no outside to the totality of things, hence 'the world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives', an idea that could in fact be extended to other levels and worlds. The book is a very worthwhile exploration of the importance of relations though within a self-limiting metaphysical context.