When We Cease to Understand the World

Amazing and deep thoughts through a different angle I had never read before. A masterpiece!

This is meant to be thought provoking and it explains concepts of math science and physics in terms of the challenges faced by the people who ended up being the most famous ones to explain them. After some brutal depictions of the very dark side of humans and what they have done with chemistry the book moves along into an engrossing narrative. Since the language these people were most fluent in was math and they worked on a mathematical level far above the understanding of most people then this book has to rely on a fictional narrative that depicts the dilemma of having to introduce new ideas that threaten established dogma and the staus quo of academia. It’s extremely entertaining to read. If you are one of those people who would like to believe that everyone who is absorbed by math and science somehow rises above the whole messy spectrum of human experience then you won’t like this book and you can go gargle with listerine and sharpen your pencils now for a cleansing moment. But if you want a succinct but fun explanation of the most fundamental concepts of quantum theory and how even the ones who first realized what they were on to had a rough time with it then you might enjoy this book.

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.

Enjoyed this read, an interesting challenge to unending scientific inquiry and our hubris at defining existence. Recommended for those interested in scientific discoveries and their pitfalls.

I was inspired to read Labatut’s book vis-à-vis an enticing interview online in which the interviewer, professor Lawrence Weschler, raved about it, coupling it with José Saramago’s Blindness, as the best book he’d ever read, both in content and style. On both counts, however, I found the book to be tertiary. The thrust of Labaut’s thesis is explicit in the title, When We Cease to Understand the World. No matter how many facts unearthed, there’s an impenetrable of mystery at the heart of things, most emphatically intoned in the chapter, “The Heart of the Heart.” Nonetheless, there’s nothing new about such a notion. It’s a salient thematic in the long history of philosophic skepticism beginning with Xenophanes, enumerated later by Hume and Kant, and intensified in Hans Georg Gadamer (Hermeneutics), Jacques Derrida (Deconstructionism), and Wittgenstein in the twentieth century. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously said that we cannot know ultimate Truth (the noumenon), only appearances (phenomena) by virtue of the a priori constructs of human consciousness that frame “reality” (the thing in itself) and force us to perceive it in terms of space, time, and causality, but which may have nothing whatsoever to do with it. Nietzsche stretched this further: How do we even know there is a noumenon? A much better book endorsing skepticism is Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt, tenfold in size, and rife with cognitive limitations of religion, philosophy, and science. Also noteworthy is James Watson’s The Age of Atheists, in which he claims that “completeness” is a bogus concept in science—that there are logical constraints to what we can know. As to scientific skepticism, Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery stipulates that though scientific knowledge may increase, it is never complete, invariably a work in progress. This is amplified in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structures of Scientific Revolution, which claims that the prevailing paradigmatic “take” on knowledge is ephemeral, only to be replaced—inevitably—by another paradigm ad infinitum. Labatut considers his book unique in that it offers a biographical portrayal of the skeptics. But this too is far from new. There is Barbara Lovett Cline’s Men Who Made a New Physics: Physicists and the Quantum Theory, which in addition to explaining theoretical insights, recounts in detail the lives of Rutherford, Bohr, Planck, and Einstein. And most recently (last month), Tobias Hürter’s Too Big for a Single Mind: How the Greatest Generation of Physicists Uncovered the Quantum World not only considers biographical material, but draws on their notes, diaries, and memoirs. In philosophy, there is Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy. All of these have heft. Not Labatut’s string bean thin, large-print paperback that can be read in a single day. Labatut claims he’s lacing fact with fiction (apotheosizing the latter). Still, despite the alleged elegant style that Weschler (the interviewer) applauds, the writing is bland as a Wikipedia article. Utterly lacking in panache. I think, by contrast, of Bruce Duffy’s marvelous novelistic portrayal of Wittgenstein in The World as I Found It. The lyricism is lush. In the ilk of mixing fact and fiction, one also thinks of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman novels—head and shoulders above Labatut both in quality and quantity (thirty). How ironic that in that interview he’s full of himself. His self-congratulatory demeanor (and glaring arrogance) is unearned. Though densely detailed, the opening chapter “Prussian Blue” (twenty-eight pages) is not as impressive as first meets the eye. Consider Alexander Thereaux’s two volumes, Primary Colors and Secondary Colors, which are scintillatingly encyclopedic. I suspect he has near total recall. He qualifies colors like no one else, even broaching on their supposed odors. Compared to Thereaux, Labatut is checkers versus 3D chess. Finally, Labatut’s supposedly elegant elucidations pale before Thereaux’s painterly prose. For those who know nothing about quantum physics, Labatut’s book will no doubt be helpful. But readers would be better served by Frank Close’s The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, Jim Braggart’s The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Minutes, Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, Fritjof Capra’s contemporary classic The Tao of Physics, or Amanda Gefter’s Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything—all of which sidestep definitive resolutions to quantum/cosmic problems.

This was an easy and enjoyable read, but at the same time also a little confusing. The basic premise seems to be that modern science in its attempt to explain the world often makes the world worse via the law of unintended consequences. This is illustrated by a series of vignettes. For example, the invention of the dye Prussian Blue led to the discovery of the poison hydrogen cyanide which was used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Thus, what first seems like beautiful solutions can inadvertently lead to deadly results. Another example concerns the chemist who discovered how to extract ammonia from nitrogen in the air. This enabled an effective fertilizer which saved millions of lives by averting world famine. However, a byproduct of this was development of chlorine gas which found horrible use in World War I. Still other examples are taken from the early days of quantum physics, general relativity and abstract mathematics. The physicists and mathematicians who pioneered these scientific breakthroughs were often troubled by the unhappy outcomes that might (or in the case of the atom bomb, actually did) result. A peculiar feature of this book is that it is in the form of a "nonfiction novel." The author presents real and verifiable persons, but often extrapolates into the realm of fiction in describing their innermost thoughts and psychological evolutions. At the end, he even introduces a mysterious "night gardener" who warns of the dangers of a scientific quest for knowledge that can lead to staring into an abyss. This novel, while a bit dystopian, remains an interesting read that has its own charm.

When We Cease to Understand the World is an brilliantly written but very unusual book. It has kernels of fact surrounded by glittering shells of variegated fiction. As a genre, it feels different than historical fiction. It might rather be labeled biographical fiction, or fictive biography, or truth that never occurred. I got through the whole book before I found out that what I read was only partially true and mostly untrue. On the very last page the author Bejamin Labatut disclosed that what I'd spent four days reading is "a work of fiction based on real events," and that the fiction "grows throughout the book," so that the earliest story is mostly factual, but each succeeding story becomes more and more fantastical, with elements of fact thrown in. It's as if the mortar holding thick cinder blocks together is truth while the cinder blocks themselves are fiction. When We Cease to Understand the World is a series of vignettes on brilliant scientists. The first story is about the Jewish/German chemist, Fritz Haber, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918. Haber probably saved multiple billions of people from starvation with a process extracting nitrogen from thin air, using the nitrogen in fertilizer to increase crops. He married Clara Immerwahr, the first woman in Germany to earn a doctorate in chemistry. Haber's story darkens when we learn of his participation in chemical warfare and the gassing of French troops in World War I. Haber also indirectly had a hand in gassing the Jews of World War II. A powerful pesticide he helped invent (dubbed zyklon) was utilized by the Nazis in the camps to exterminate Jews. And here he was, a German Jew ultimately contributing to the death of his family members. Labatut garnishes all of this with fiction. As, for instance, it is a fact that Haber's wife Clara killed herself with a shot to her chest from Haber's own pistol. But Labatut sets that suicide during a marital argument about the military uses of chemistry. This is not a matter of fact. Truth plus fiction. And the whole of the story is exquisitely beautiful. (This last sentence will be my chorus.) The second tale concerns Karl Schwarzschild, a Jewish/German physicist who wrote to Jewish/German Albert Einstein from a 1915 World War I battlefield with very precise solutions to Einstein's field equations, a revelation that Einstein marveled at and welcomed. Schwarzschild went on to become the youngest professor in Germany. Labatut lavishes Schwarzschild with numerous eccentricities, none of which are factually true. Labatut tells of Schwarzschild taking extravagant risks with his life and the life his brother and friends in climbing adventures in the Swiss Alps. But I cannot corroborate this story. And Labatut's galloping imagination has Schwarzschild involved in the gassing of French troops mentioned in the Haber story. Schwarzschild was indeed asked to use his mathematical genius to help German officers make ballistic calculations so that bombs would drop precisely where the German officers intended them to drop. But there's no evidence that Schwarzschild did that for the bombs containing gas. Fact plus fiction. Chorus: And the whole of the story is exquisitely beautiful. The third tale concerns two math geniuses. The first is the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki (born 1969 and entered Princeton at age 16), a genius in number theory. The second is Jewish/German Alexander Grothendieck (died 2014), whom some call the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century. Here, Labatut uses one eccentric to annotate the life of a second eccentric. Labatut exaggerates the oddness of Mochizuki in numerous ways, but especially in a story about the mathematician solving aspects of Grothendieck’s mathematics that stunned the entire world of mathematics with ideas that seemed to be from a future century that no could fully penetrate. But Shinichi Mochizuki is only a calling card for the person Labatut really wants to discuss, and that's Alexander Grothendieck. We cannot discount Grothendieck's genius, but Labatut lathers on extremely bizarre stories of the mathematician ripping up carpets in homes, sleeping on removed doors, and inviting all manner of social outcasts to live in his home like it's a commune. In a final scene, Grothendieck is on his deathbed in a hospital and he has forbidden anyone to seem him—no family, no friends. Except one. A nurse recalls that a lone, shy Japanese man was granted entry. (We're not told who the man is but of course it's supposed to be Shinichi Mochizuki.) And the mysterious Japanese man stayed with Grothendieck until Grothendieck's dying last breath. This cannot be factual! Chorus: And yet the whole of the story is exquisitely beautiful. You get the picture, right? Remaining stories in the collection are about Louis De Brogelie, the French winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1929; Werner Heisenberg, the German winner of the Nobel Prize in physics 1932; and Erwin Schrödinger, the Austrian winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1933. In all these tales we have kernels of truth with husks of the wildest fabrication. Don't imagine this is not a book for non-scientists. I am not a scientist and I was wholly drawn into Labatut's intricately tooled prose.

One of the smartest books I’ve ever read. This book has stayed with me, reappearing in my mind time and again. Mathematics. Philosophy. Even Benjamin Netanyahu shows up as a six year-old. Definitely recommended. Ten stars.