“Carlo Rovelli is a genius… This is the place where science comes to life” (Neil Gaiman). Join the world-renowned physicist and artist Cornelia Parker for a journey into the wondrous realm of quantum mechanics.
A fearless free spirit, renowned scientist, and bestselling author whose Seven Brief Lessons on Physics confirmed him as the heir to Hawking’s crown as an exceptional physicist who also excels as a science communicator, able to convey the majesty and strangeness of our universe with rare poetry, Carlo Rovelli is undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers of our time.
He joins Cornelia Parker live on stage in London to take us on a journey into the sub-atomic world – telling the stories of the pioneers who changed the way we understand reality forever.
In 1925, on the treeless windswept island of Helgoland in the North Sea, the young Werner Heisenberg, aged just 23, had retreated to think. Walking alone and through the night, he had an idea, “one that would transform physics in its entirety – together with the whole of science and our very conception of the world.”
Heisenberg had begun to glimpse the strange beauty of the sub-atomic world that to this day both underpins and mystifies our conception of reality. In Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli tells the story of the bright young men who completed the theory of quantum mechanics and were to become some of the world’s most famous Nobellists. Their science gave birth to the modern world.
It is also the story of Rovelli’s own contribution to the field – that at the sub atomic level particles don’t come into being until they interact with one another; that life is made of relations.
Praise for the works of Carlo Rovelli:
“I am inspired by the passion and clarity with which Rovelli insists that everything is about relations; it is events not things that matter” Antony Gormley, sculptor
“What elevates it even more is the deep humanity he brings to his subject… ” Julian Baggini
In association with the Goethe Institute ‘Living in a Quantum State‘ Project.
