When We Cease to Understand the World
The late nineteenth and entire twentieth centuries reeked of industry and human innovation as humankind observed, dissected, and theorized about the nature of the universe, matter, everything vast and miniscule. In effect, mathematical and scientific theory attempted to define everything, everywhere, all at once (to borrow the phrase). The impact, as Benjamín Labatut demonstrates in When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), led to immense suffering on mass scale (think: WWI and WWII). But Labatut’s book also investigates the private anguish, the inner misery of some of the world’s greatest minds. By interweaving facts from 20th-century history, physics, chemistry, and mathematics with a healthy dose of fiction, Labatut creates a wildly readable book that both educates and troubles, confounds and inspires. It is the perfect book to read in tandem with watching one of this summer’s blockbuster movies Oppenheimer as we consider the question of where that invisible line ought to exist in the figurative sand of human innovation.
Written in five books that largely stand alone, When We Cease to Understand the World touches on the stories of human innovation in chemistry, mathematics, and physics. It is a deep dive into some of the big moments in 20th-century STEM, but likely not the specific moments largely known. Labatut highlights occasions of monumental strides in terms of understanding that pushed us toward private and collective madness as humanity occupied greater power and knowledge than, perhaps, our frail forms can handle. Labatut brilliantly blends nonfiction and fiction as he recounts, explores, unveils, and seeks to understand discoveries and theorum that forever changed the way we humans perceive ourselves and the world in which we live.
The first section, “Prussian Blue” covers the invention of the title’s paint (a radical moment in the world of 18th-century painting as it replaced wildly expensive blues made of ground lapis lazuli stone). Most of the essay focuses on the discovery of cyanide when a chemist stirred the vivid blue paint with a spoon that catalyzed a chemical reaction. Cyanide’s existence led to poison gas as seen in the trenches of the Great War and in the Nazi extermination chambers. The paradox that a color, so beautiful and revolutionary in the art world, might lead to mass death is certainly not lost on the reader. Innovation, Labatut establishes early in his book, often leads to catastrophic and unintended consequences. This section includes reference to a host of innovators, physicists, and chemists like Carl Wilhelm Scheele who in 1782 inadvertently discovered the most powerful poison in the world when he stirred that paint and introduced traces of sulphuric acid which created cyanide, Fritz Haber the Jewish chemist and innovator of poison gas warfare, and Allan Turring, known, among other things for that famous bite in an apple that ended it all and provides Apple with such a clever logo. Each of these individuals suffered wildly in their own lives, but they were not alone in their suffering; humanity suffered along with them.
In the second section, “Schwarzschild’s Singularity,” the reader bears witness to Karl Schwarzschild (astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and a lieutenant in the German Army in 1915) as he creates the first theory of black holes (known as “Schwarzschild’s singularity”). In his final days of life, he sent Einstein “the first exact solution of the theory of general relativity” mere weeks after its publication (37). One of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century, who was able to see proof of Einstein’s theories even when Einstein himself could not (and in the midst of a war), died prematurely from the very gas readers learn about in detail in the first section. Humanity innovates and destroys at equal pace, it seems.
The third section is “The Heart of the Heart,” which dives into some very theoretical math with the stories of Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki and his predecessor Alexander Grothendieck. In August 2012, Mochizuki published a series of articles on his blog containing a proof of a + b = c, but he soon removed the posts (thousands of pages long). As Labatut unwinds both mathematicians’ stories, it is clear that both became more secretive and removed from society as their mathematical work progresses. o the reader observes the theme: humans who approach even a fraction of omniscience, seem incapable of dealing with the knowledge they uncover. Mathematical proofs seem to corner them in a room with lava for floors and they cower on the receding solid floor.
The fourth, the longest, and the titular essay, “When We Cease to Understand the World,” includes a prologue, five sections, and an epilogue populated by characters like Erwin Schrödinger. The story, however, is really about physicists Werner Karl Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. It is a story about Heisenberg’s obsessive work and strange social behaviors. At the heart of it lies a question that Heisenberg only begins to describe after a night of absinthe-induced hallucination. Bohr mentors Heisenberg through it all and immediately recognizes the world-changing nature of his theories. Much of the physics in this (and previous sections), I will admit, I understand only to the faintest degree; yet reading about the process of innovation, the madness that interweaves with theoretical science, is fascinating, particularly when placed within Labatut’s captivating narratives.
In the final essay, “The Night Gardener,” readers find something altogether different. It is a beautiful end to a book full of horrors and the madness courted by so many geniuses in the preceding essays. It too is broken into sections (six). The sixth section opens with the brilliant line that really captures the themes of this essay: “The night gardener, used to a mathematician, and now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing” (186). This section is an ode to the natural world and its restorative properties, particularly for those humans who may have fallen too far into the analytical or theoretical.
Reading When We Cease to Understand the World is a whirlwind of whose-who in terms of 20th-century mathematic and scientific advances. It is notable that madness and mayhem tend to follow in the wake of nearly all the stories. And yet, Labatut concludes this genre-bending work with a return to cultivated earth. This a book to stumble through, to sit with, to let wash over you as the reader. It is a book everyone should perhaps spend time with as a reminder of the humility we surely need to cultivate just as thoroughly as any garden.
Bibliography:
Labatut, Benjamín. Trans. By Adrian Nathan West. When We Cease to Understand the World. New York Review Books: 2020.
A Few Great Passages:
“The greatest testament to the terror caused by history’s first weapon of mass destruction was the universal acceptance of the prohibition on gas during the Second World War. [. . .] Even Hitler, who showed no qualms when using gas in the extermination camps, refused to do so in fields of war, for although his scientists had manufactured some seven thousand tons of sarin, enough to eradicate the population of thirty cities the size of Paris, he had witnessed its effects first-hand as a foot soldier in the trenches of the First World War, had seen the agony of the dying and had suffered some of its lesser effects himself” (24).
“Did you know the first symptom of psychological disturbance is the inability to contend with the future? If you consider that, you will realize how implausible it is that we are able to exert control over even an hour of our lives. How hard it is to control our thoughts!” (155).
“In philosophical terms, he [Bohr] told him [Heisenberg] as he took his arm, this was the end of determinism. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised. According to the determinists, if one could reveal the laws that governed matter, one could reach back to the most archaic past and predict the most distant future. If everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state, then merely by looking at the present and running the equations it would be possible to achieve a godlike knowledge of the universe. Those hopes were shattered in light of Heisenberg’s discovery: what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be perfectly apprehended. However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both” (161-62).
