When We Cease to Understand the World

Labatut, B. (2020). When we cease to understand the world (A. N. West, Trans.). New York Review Books.Benjamin Labatut is a writer who was born in the Netherlands and currently lives in Chile.This is a strangely wonderful "work of fiction based on real events" exploring the lives of scientists, physicists, and mathematicians who through their questions, exploration, and focus began to contemplate the consequences and implications of that which they created. The narrative provides a fictionalized account of Herman Goring, Johann Jacob Diesback, Johann Conrad Dippel, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Shinichi Mochizuki, Alexander Grothendieck, Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Karl Heisenberg, Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th duc de Broglie, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein. In the midst of their creativity, these creators experienced ill-health, madness, guilt, and regret. The final chapter is written through the eyes of the narrator who listens to his night gardener, a mathematician, who concluded, "that it was mathematics - not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon - which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant."This book explores the lives of those who explore the sciences, physics, and mathematics. Their outputs often raise questions about potential and even unintended consequences. The writing combines research, history, and speculative fiction. For those interested in the moral and ethical questions raised by the film Oppenheimer, this book would be a wonderful book for contemplation.

The book itself is good quality and handy. I like that it's not so heavy so I can carry on my bag anywhere

I have rarely come across such intense writing style like this one. It often got me absorbed in thoughts. I would have to gather myself after every chapter(or the story of each individual discussed) in the book. Amazing! Thank you! 🙏

A very interesting book about the mind of sceintists providing also an historical context to it.

This book was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, one of two books by Pushkin Press – who publish “the world’s best stories, to be read and read again.”The book starts with a almost entirely non-fictional chapter “Prussian Blue”, which has heavy overlap with Sebald's "Rings of Saturn" (for example starting with silkworms) and takes in (largely via the German scientist, Noble Prize winner but also alleged war criminal) Fritz Haber such ideas as German end WW2 mass suicides, artifical pigmentation, WW1 gas attacks (including Hitler as a victim), the amphetamine dependency of the Nazi war machine, Zyklon-B, nitrogen-based fertilisers both natural/historic and artificial (via the synthesis of ammonia), poisons and so on. The author has the section contains only one fictional paragraph which I think could be the last one – where Haber’s true lack of remorse for his War actions (which in WW1 even lead to the suicide of his wife) was said to instead have regretted his role in allowing the risk of fertiliser enhanced nature to take over the world.The second chapter concentrates on Karl Schwarzschild and his remarkable work on solving Einstein’s General Relativity Equations while posted on the Russian front (my pun – he could have been said to have solved the Field Equations while in the field), and despite suffering from a completely debilitating genetic auto-immune disease which may have been triggered by a gas attack (linking of course to the first chapter). Symbolically though the many different ideas in the chapter are inexorably drawn to one central idea Schwarzschild first originated – the Black Hole. A physical singularity which is a necessary consequence of the mathematical equations of space-time but which is difficult if not impossible for us to really conceive of in any conventional terms; and something which at first – and particularly to Einstein - seemed a paradox, an anomaly, a consequence of either over-simplification or of applying a formula beyond the limits and bounds where it can be correctly parameterised – but which in science has gradually accepted as being real and fundamental to our understanding of physics. The even greater power in this chapter though is the corollary drawn (I am not clear if really by Schwarzschild or by Schwarzschild interpreted by Labatut that human psyche (if sufficiently warped and concentrated on a single purpose) could perhaps produce an equally terrible singularity “a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world”, something even more terrible than WW1 – which is of course a prophecy of the rise of Nazi-ism.The third chapter in my view was the weakest – about the Japanese mathematician Mochizuki and his predecessor the master of abstraction Alexander Grothendieck. Thematically the chapter fits well – with the idea of mathematical concepts which while seemingly true seem impossible for most people to understand, and the idea that at the centre (for the few who do comprehend them) is something terrible and dangerous; but I just did not feel it came to life as well as the other chapters or had particularly strong mathematical descriptions (a quick Wiki look up helped me grasp A+B = C much better than the chapter). Here I think a largely factual basis has a number of fictional elements (particularly I think around Grothendieck’s last days).The fourth section is the longest – by now the gradual blending of fiction and fact has come to something of a balance.The factual scaffolding of this section is the two rival schools of interpretation of Quantum mechanics – Erwin Schrödinger and his Uncertainty Principle, and Werner Heisenberg and his Copenhagen interpretation as developed with his mentor Niels Bohr - rival schools which were not just about different mathematical formulations but about different mathematical/physical worldviews as explained in a preface “while Schrödinger had needed only a single equation to describe virtually the whole of modern chemistry and physics, Heisenberg’s ideas and formulae were exceptionally abstract, philosophically revolutionary, and so dreadfully complex” – further Heisenberg we are told (in a return to one of the author’s key themes) had “glimpsed a dark nucleus at the heart of things”.Much of the rest of this section is then a fictional imagining of (quoting the author’s own description of this part) “the conditions under which each one of them had their particular epiphany”. Schrödinger’s sensuous time on a ski resort, his “lover’s …..pearls inside his ears to concentrate”, Heisenberg’s solitary time with horrendous hayfever on Heglioland – scene of course post-war of one of the largest ever man-made explosions, a non-nuclear and peace time explosion by the victorious British of surplus armaments. Now of course (partly my link partly the author’s) had Heisenberg not failed in his development of the German WW2 Atomic Weapons programme (in contrast to Haber’s success in the German WW1 Chemical Weapons programme) a very different explosion (nuclear, war-time, by the Germans) may have taken place instead and the history of the World been very different.These fictional sections – Heisenberg’s in particular, mix dreams and visions with quantum physics – returning to another recurring theme of the book, that many great mathematical and mathematical physics discoveries (particularly those relating to the mysterious world of higher mathematics and quantum mechanics) begin with a literally imaginative and visionary leap beyond conventional thinking with then the harder work being to put the mathematical framework behind it (this very idea of a factual scaffolding holding up but also inspired by an imaginative piece also mirroring the very structure of this fourth section).And one of the key visions that Heisenberg has ends in a nightmarishy way – when he later meets with Bohr he tells him everything that lead up to his developments of his quantum theory other than this part."but for a strange reason he could explain neither to himself nor to Bohr, for it was one he would not understand until decades later, he was incapable of confessing his vision of the dead baby at his feet, or the thousands of figures who had surrounded him in the forest, as if wishing to warn him of something, before they were carbonized in an instant by that flash of blind light."And we of course see know that this vision is linked to and maybe even acted as a warning to Heisenberg not to contemplate the German Atomic weapons programme. I was of course reminder of Michael Frayn’s brilliant play “Copenhagen” which tells and retells the story of Heisenberg and Bohr’s meeting in 1941 and what it meant for both the US and German programmes.The last chapter rounds the book off neatly – a first party and entirely fictional account, where the narrator, in Chile, meets a night-time gardener, an ex-mathematican and the two discuss many of the ideas in earlier chapters and the book’s overall themes.The book is translated (extremely naturally I have to say) by Adrian Nathan WestA brilliant book.