Intelligence Squared

Carlo Rovelli is the internationally bestselling theoretical physicist whose many fans include Benedict Cumberbatch, Antony Gormley, Neil Gaiman and Lily Cole. In May 2021 he came to Intelligence Squared to talk about the themes of his new book Helgoland, in which he takes us back to the birth of a revolutionary idea that has reshaped the whole of science and our very conception of the world. Rovelli told the story of the brilliant young Werner Heisenberg who, suffering from hay fever, retreated to the treeless island of Helgoland in the North Sea where he began to glimpse a world in which nothing exists until it interacts with something else, upending our all-too-solid conception of reality. This is the world of quantum theory. Now a century on from Heisenberg’s extraordinary insight, Rovelli has done what he dared not do before – to connect quantum theory with a panoply of philosophical ideas, including Buddhist thought, the problem of consciousness and even the discussions between Lenin and Bogdanov at