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 older I grow the more things I think I don’t understand. While I think that this book alludes to knowledge leading to lack of such there was something in the cohesion missing for me.

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.

Awesome in the true sense of the word: A reading experience that evokes awe in the reader. [At least for me that is a literally true statement]. First of all, Labatut's writing is off the charts beautiful. Before reading this book, though this is the older of the two, I read his wonderful 'The Maniac.' I don't know anything about Mr. Labatut as a person but can now testify that there are very few, if any, better writers in this world [that I know of] for sure. In this book as in The Maniac his subject is the great pioneering physicists of the past century, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and quite a few others as well. We encounter their personalities, the evolution of their ideas and discoveries, their personal challenges, the disagreements among them and so on. Quite a trip it is for an old simple dude like me. Fascinating, entertaining, educational. I love his books absolutely and can hardly recommend them highly enough. Yes, actually awesome!

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.

When We Cease to Understand the World is an imaginative recreation of many of the personalities and discoveries in twentieth century math and physics. A seemingly playful blend of fiction and non-fiction, the book concludes in anything but a playful fashion that reality is, at its root, irrational. It is only in a departure from rationality, in a strange mix of disease and intuition, that we both understand and cease to understand the world. This is, obviously, well traveled ground. Labatut distinguishes himself with his blend of fiction and non-fiction to accentuate the point. And he expresses himself in language that is, even in translation, beyond eloquent. He does get a few points wrong (complementarity is Bohr’s relationship between quantum and classical physics not the incommensurability of measuring position and momentum). And his thesis could be counter argued with numerous examples. For example, John Von Neumann was one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century but was comfortable in the company of aristocrats and generals. He had no traces of mental illness. But there is more to Labatut’s thesis than the caricature of the mad scientist. Quantum theory is still not understood outside of its mathematical predictions; and it is now almost a century since its formulation. General Relativity still gives rise to phenomena difficult to fathom; though Labatut decides not to mention all the progress that has been made. Whether reality, at its crux, is irrational, supernatural or rational in a way that just hasn’t been formulated is a question on which humanity has obviously not yet reached a conclusion. As a literary expression of one point of view, Labatut is worth reading. Recommended to those interested in such matters.

The notion of imaginatively entering the mystical minds of the scientists who gave us the power to complete destroy ourselves with forbidden knowledge seemed a reach. However, the novel does accomplish that very well and, I think, gives a non-scientist reader a good flavor of these extraordinary ideas and their effects. The provocative question, left open, is, what was the source of these truly fecund and, dangerous, ideas that yielded so much insight as well as destruction? The novel prompted me to ask, did these various discoveries about the nature of reality, which allowed nuclear weapons to exist, start a kind of clock counting down the end of our civilization? However, as someone theologically minded, it occurs to me that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, breaking down determinism, reminds us that nature is open and compatible with grace. And Einstein’s desire to overcome total uncertainty might well be an opening to Logos. The book is thought-provoking. It is a dramatic rendering of the highest intellectual achievements of humans and the danger of hubris in approaching the deepest and highest truths of the structure of reality. Looking around Western civilization in 2024, the question posed by the novel is radically relevant: When did we cease to understand the world? The answer to that question has grave consequences.

I’ll admit I came to Benjamín Labatut’s novel expecting something rather different, more like Malcolm Gladwell or Michael Lewis, a collection of stories woven together around a central thread with some clear thesis, but that’s not what I got, and I’m better for it. “When We Cease to Understand the World” captures the brutal tragedy of some of humanity’s finest physicists as they encountered quantum mechanics, focusing on the very people who brought the field into being. The transition, shocking and painful, from a classical view of the world as a giant mechanism of interlocking gears, basically, is laid bare as a lie. Grothendieck and Schwartzchild, Schrödinger and Heisenberg, de Broglie, Bohr, and Einstein plumb the depths, trying to make sense out of the strata of our world beneath the atom. And for it they are driven nearly mad! I adored the section between Schwartzchild and Richard Courant, a (fictionalization of a) dialogue where Schwartzchild has beheld the concept of the black hold and it has eaten his mind alive. He conveys, worse than some distant star collapsing, that he sees the same process, an accretion of human will in Germany, glimpsing what would become the Nazi movement, and recoils in horror. That kind of prescience, seeing something terrible coming down the pike, that feeling of inevitability at an age of great peril impending so fiercely, is something I’ve felt. Born as the sun rose after the long night of the Cold War, come of age at the outset of new great-power struggle between East and West, a veteran of the war in Central Asia, that scene was haunting and spoke deeply to me. If you enjoy Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, or accounts of famous scientists, you’ll love this book!

Indefinable by genre, vastly detailed and brilliantly written history mixed with fiction. It recalls WF Sebald, DM Thomas, and other masters of style. Those who know the history of quantum physics will love the drama. Others who fear the promethean rise of technology in modern times will find echoes of our premonitions of catastrophe. The final image of the lemon tree is poignant.

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 West A brilliant book.

Brings to life some of the most amazing discoveries of mankind. It is iveting reading and provide lots of useful information.

this book is bonkers and i love it. the internet may be infinitely abundant with the most bizarre pieces of information, but there's just something entirely different about reading it, consuming it in writing that's come from someone whose utter, boundless fascination and all-consuming curiosity is so so so evident in the way they've written those pieces. you can't help but LEARN and reflect that same curiosity. you consume and inhibit a similar fascination. you 'cultivate' that similar wonder in your heart. you start waking up with the same '????s' scrambling around your mind. AI could have very well told me the same 'facts' about Schwarzschild, the same 'scientifically accurate, research-and-evidence-backed information' about black holes and red stars and prussian blue, but it could possibly not have told it to me in a way that would've instilled the same music going on in Schwarzschild's mind, into mine. it couldn't give me those stories in a way they were meant to be taken and held. it would've said, leaves green. not "leaves as evidence of your favourite shade of green from when you were 11." i highly highly highly recommend this.

Fabulous book.