Do things have properties in and of themselves, or is a thing only what it seems to be to its observer and the interactions it has with other things? Is there a universal notion of time, or is time just a local experience that is different for each observer?
These are some of the questions being tackled by Carlo Rovelli in his theory of Relational Quantum Mechanics which was analyzed by Mauro Dorato in his paper Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics, Anti-Monism, and Quantum Becoming.
My key takeaways from this paper were:
Things are defined by their interactions with other things and have no inherent properties of their own
A system cannot know itself fully and therefore the universe as a whole is unknowable…. “everything” is in many ways identical with “no-thing”.
We all have our own timeline and our own view from “here” that serves as a “local becoming”. In a way, our point of view is our universe.
One quote that really jumped out at me that was not even one from Carlo Rovelli. It was this quote from Julian Barbour:
“if we want to get a true idea of what a point of space-time is like we should look outward at the universe…The complete notion of a point of space-time in fact consists of the appearance of the entire universe as seen from that point.”
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