Zack Savitsky in Quanta Magazine:
Sitting outside a Catholic church on the French Riviera, Carlo Rovelli jutted his head forward and backward, imitating a pigeon trotting by. Pigeons bob their heads, he told me, not only to stabilize their vision but also to gauge distances(opens a new tab) to objects — compensating for their limited binocular vision. “It’s all perspectival,” he said.
A theoretical physicist affiliated with Aix-Marseille University, Rovelli studies how we perceive reality from our limited vantage point. His research is wide-ranging, running the gamut from quantum information to black holes, and often delves into the history and philosophy of science. In the late 1980s, he helped develop a theory called loop quantum gravity that aims to describe the quantum underpinnings of space and time. A decade later, he proposed a new “relational” interpretation of quantum mechanics, which goes so far as to suggest that there is no objective reality whatsoever, only perspectives on reality — be they a physicist’s or a pigeon’s.
More here.
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