When We Cease To Understand The World

Pick it up: Labatut masterfully weaves historical figures and events with fictionalized accounts and perspectives - if you appreciate this kind of experimental storytelling you will find this novel captivating. If you are interested in the history of science, particularly quantum physics and chemistry.

When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamin Labatut (translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West)

This is an unusual work of fiction based on real events. In five stories that loop and bend toward each other, the author looks at both the brilliance and dangers of scientific achievement, and the individuals behind the most influential advances in physics and mathematics. 

We read about Fritz Haber, the German scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1918 for devising a method to pull ammonia from nitrogen in the air, for use as fertiliser, which helped prevent famine and the starvation of hundreds of millions of people. However, Haber was also responsible for the military use of chlorine gas that was used to horrific effect in WW1.

There is Karl Schwarzchild, a physicist who came up with the solutions to Einstein’s equations of general relativity while in the trenches of WW1 and in this process proving the existence of black holes, a concept that shook the world of physics but terrified Schwarzchild enough for him to abandon his work.

We read about mathematicians Alexander Grothendieck, a colossus in the field of mathematics in the mid part of the 20th century, and Shinichi Mochizuki who created much excitement in 2012 when he published a 500 page article containing a proof of the abc conjecture (one of the most important conjectures in number theory which is a+b = c). A proof that no one was able to comprehend, then and to this day. 

The titular story focuses on names from the world of physics that even those of us who are non-science folk would have heard of - Erwin Schrödinger  and Werner Karl Heisenberg, who spent the better part of their careers at odds with each other’s work. Schrodinger’s wave equation - that describes the energy and position of the electron in space and time and a fundamental equation in quantum physics, was met with furious opposition from Heisenberg who maintained that methods from classical physics could not be used to explain the quantum world. This led him to the development of his Uncertainty Principle, which states that the position and momentum of a particle cannot be measured simultaneously. Which led to the invention of quantum mechanics. Quantum theory is at the core of most of the significant advances in modern technology. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has never been disproved.

The unifying narrative thread among the five stories is the internal chaos that these scientists faced, their struggles, their obsessions almost to the point of madness, their isolation, and how together they serve as a cautionary tale, about the limits of our understanding despite all of the questions that supposedly have been answered by science.

It can be a bit unsettling to read the novel and not know what is real and what springs from the imagination of Labatut - the science is real, the people too, but beyond this, we can’t be sure, and this may be a little difficult to absorb, a little bit like Schrödinger and Eisnstein’s resistance to the uncertainty principle. But overall, a very enlightening and satisfying read. 

“The atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicists armed with a fistful of equations.” (Alexander Grothendieck)