When We Cease To Understand The World By Benjamín Labatut And Translated By Adrian Nathan West — Review

A thought-provoking hybrid of science fact and novelistic imagination that invites the reader to think about the psychological impact of scientific advances, focusing on developments in the 20th century that led to widespread changes in how we understand the world

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We rise, we fall. We may rise by falling.

Defeat shapes us. Our only wisdom is tragic, known too late, and only to the lost.

— Guy Davenport (quoted in the foreword)

Benjamín Labatut’s book, When We Cease To Understand The World (translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West) is the most remarkable book I’ve ever read (Pushkin Press; 2021: Amazon US / Amazon UK). It’s an astounding blend of the history of scientific discovery with increasing surreal fiction that examines what happens to our minds when we reach the edges of scientific knowledge and the outer limits of human thought, when we actually can see what we cannot understand.

It features an essay, two short stories and a novella. The essay is entitled ‘Prussian Blue’. It begins by retelling the story of a small molecule, hydrogen cyanide, which was detected in the tail of Halley’s comet, and may be a precursor for amino acids. Hydrogen cyanide also is the key ingredient in the first modern artificial pigment, Prussian blue. The story of this one small, deadly, molecule is used to weave together science, art and history “and that lead me to some of the greatest chemical discoveries, war crimes and massacres of the 20th Century”, said the author in a recent interview.

This powerful (and alarming) essay is almost totally comprised of historic fact. But as the book progresses, the author introduces ever more fiction into each account as he follows chemists, physicists and mathematicians who fall under the spell of their creations.

The essay is followed by two short stories, the first which is entitled ‘Schwarzchild’s Singularity’. It tells the story of astronomer and mathematician, Karl Schwarzschild. He abandoned the Académie to become a German artillery officer during World War One, where he applied his considerable mathematical prowess to calculating trajectories for poison gas. But Schwarzschild also kept up with the literature and, despite being on the battlefield, ended up providing the first complete mathematical formulation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity whilst suffering a blistering skin disease caused by poison gas on the Eastern Front. His calculations also revealed the presence of a singularity — a Black Hole. Soon after sending his calculations to Einstein, Schwarzschild died, tormented by his belief that Black Holes were also a cultural phenomenon and that the minds of millions of Germans had been compressed into the same psychic singularity from which they could never escape.

The next short story, ‘The Heart of the Heart’, is purely about maths. It begins by discussing a mathematical proof for one of the most important conjectures in number theory, known as a + b = c. This proof was originally posted on a blog by Japanese mathematician, Shinichi Mochizuki, and it is a proof that absolutely no one understands, even to this day. Instead of trying to explain the unexplainable, the author instead interweaves Mochizuki’s story with that of another mathematician, Alexander Grothendieck. He was recognized as one of the most notable mathematicians of the 20th Century, and a mathematical institute was founded in Paris in 1958 specifically for Grothendieck and his students, where they created the new discipline of algebraic geometry. But as time went on, Grothendieck came to view mathematics as the greatest single threat to human existence, and disappeared. He lived as a hermit, and was possibly visited on his deathbed by Mochizuki.

The novella from which the name of this book is taken, is mostly about the scientific rivalry between Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg. They created, less than six months apart, two equivalent yet contradicting versions of quantum mechanics, mankind’s best theories for explaining the structure of matter to date. The author says he was really interested in the conditions under which each one of these scientists had their particular epiphanies: after spending a week on a deserted island suffering a disfiguring attack of allergies, Heisenberg created a cerebral, abstract, ugly theory, based on pure math. In contrast, Schrödinger, spent a week at a ski resort with one of his lovers, with her pearls stuffed inside his ears so he could concentrate whilst they were having sex. His theory is sensuous, beautiful and visual. “The fight between those two opposing ideas gave us the Uncertainty Principle and the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics,” Labutet said, “two things that underline modern thinking, whether people realize it or not.”

“Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding” (p. 187).

The original title for this essential book, Un Verdor Terrible, comes from the essay, but if I could choose the title for the English translation, it would be The Edges of Science. This extraordinary and compelling book is an almost poetic exploration of what we can know and what we can never know. It is the beginning of deeply thinking about the nature of fact and fiction, what is real and what is unreal, and their respective boundaries.

Winner of the English PEN Award. Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker and National Book Awards for Translated Literature.

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