He had replicated in the subatomic world what Newton had done for the solar system, using only pure mathematics, with no recourse to imagery. He had no idea how he had arrived at his results, but there they were, written in his own hand; if he was correct, science could not only understand reality but begin to manipulate it at its most basic level. Heisenberg thought of the consequences knowledge of this nature might have, and was struck with a feeling of vertigo so profound that he had to restrain the impulse to throw his notebook into the sea. [loc. 1199]
In this 'nonfiction novel', Chilean author Benjamín Labatut explores the darkness at the heart of science, and the tipping-point between genius and madness. What happens to the mind when scientific theories passes the limits of human understanding?
The book is in five sections. The first, 'Prussian Blue', is a more or less solid, non-fictional discussion of the discovery of hydrogen cyanide, which 'yielded a blue of such beauty that Diesbach thought he had discovered hsbd-iryt, the original colour of the sky—the legendary blue used by the Egyptians to adorn the skin of their gods' -- and also yielded Zyklon-B, the gas used to murder millions in Nazi death camps. 'Schwartzchild's Singularity' is more fictionalised, and deals with the existential dread felt by the dying physicist who, having deduced the possibility of black holes, feared that something equally horrific could result from a sufficient concentration of human will. 'The Heart of the Heart' is about mad, or differently sane, mathematicians, Mochizuki and Grothendieck; 'When We Cease to Understand the World' fictionalises (and surrealises) the intellectual duel between Heisenberg and Schrodinger, who independently created competing theories of quantum mechanics. And 'The Night Gardener' focuses on another mathematician who abandoned his career after realising 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'. Here the author enters the book, becoming a direct narrator, interacting with -- but perhaps not fully understanding -- the night gardener.
This was not an easy read, but it was curiously compelling: it blended scientific concepts (which I believe are rendered faithfully) with the human frailties of the men who experienced those epiphanic revelations. (No female scientists here: are they less prone to such frailties?) When We Cease to Understand the World also resonated, uncomfortably, with the part of me that fears a vast, uncaring, violent universe, and used to have nightmares about falling into the void... Some really fascinating(ly horrific) details, too, like the cyanide capsules handed out by schoolchildren after a 1945 Wagner concert in Berlin: 'in small wicker baskets, like votive offerings at Mass.'
A beautiful translation from the Spanish: I felt a distinct flavour of the original language, though I'm not sure whether this is an artifact of phrasing and syntax, or a deliberate choice by the translator, or my own imagination.
Does not fulfil the ‘non-fiction in translation’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge, though I'd started reading it in the belief that it would: while the first section is non-fiction, the 'creative' elements became clearer in later chapters. "This is a work of fiction based on real events. The quantity of fiction grows throughout the book; whereas “Prussian Blue” contains only one fictional paragraph, I have taken greater liberties in the subsequent texts, while still trying to remain faithful to the scientific concepts discussed in each of them." [loc. 2205]
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