When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

Hermann Göring’s fingers and toes stained a furious red, the consequence of his addiction to dihydrocodeine, an analgesic of which he took more than one hundred pills a day. William Burroughs described it as similar to heroin, twice as strong as codeine, but with a wired coke-like edge,

A wave of suicides swept through Germany in the final months of the war. In April 1945 alone, three thousand eight hundred people killed themselves in Berlin.

died instantly when the minuscule cyanide molecule, formed by one atom of nitrogen, one of carbon and one of potassium, entered her bloodstream and cut off her breath.

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. Passed down across the centuries, closely guarded by the priests of Egypt as part of their divine covenant,

They distributed guides and manuals of all kinds to small farmers, detailing the state-sanctioned techniques for the harvesting and processing of silkworms: they were to be suspended over a vessel of boiling water for more than three hours, the minimum time required to kill them without damaging the precious material of the cocoons they had woven around themselves.

He died with a ravaged liver, his body covered head to toe in purulent blisters, paralysed by the build-up of fluid in his joints. These were the same symptoms suffered by thousands of European children whose toys were painted with an arsenic-based pigment Scheele manufactured, unaware of its toxicity: an emerald green so dazzling and seductive it became Napoleon’s favourite colour.

cyanide takes your breath away. In sufficient concentrations, it stimulates the carotid body’s receptors all at once, triggering a reflex that cuts off respiration.

In prior centuries, Europe’s insatiable hunger had driven bands of Englishmen as far as Egypt to despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried along with the Nile pharaohs, as sacrificial victims, to serve them even after their deaths. The English tomb raiders had exhausted the reserves in continental Europe; they dug up more than three million human skeletons, along with the bones of hundreds of thousands of dead horses that soldiers had ridden in the battles of Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo, sending them by ship to the port of Hull in the north of England, where they were ground in the bone mills of Yorkshire to fertilize the verdant fields of Albion.

Adi, as he was affectionately known to his comrades

any object could generate a singularity if its matter were compressed into a sufficiently restricted space: for the sun, three kilometres, for the earth, eight millimetres, and 0.000000000000000000000001 centimetres for the mass of an average human body.

If matter were prone to birthing monsters of this kind, Schwarzschild asked with a trembling voice, were there correlations with the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human will—millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space—unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually taking place in the Fatherland.

One of the colleges at which he taught in Vietnam was later bombed by American troops; two professors and dozens of students died.

Towards the end of his life, his point of view was so remote that he was only capable of perceiving totality. Of his personality, nothing but tatters remained, tenuous threads pulled apart by years of constant meditation. “I have an irrefutable and perhaps blasphemous sense that I know God more intimately than I do any other being in this world, even though He is an impenetrable mystery, infinitely vaster than any physical entity.”

Heisenberg followed a strict regimen of physical activity: at dawn he would leap into the sea and swim until he had rounded the huge outcrop where, according to the owner of the hotel, Germany’s greatest pirate treasure was hidden. Heisenberg only returned to the shore when he was completely exhausted, almost on the point of drowning.

the words of his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.

on Heligoland after the end of the Second World War, when they piled up all their unused munitions, torpedoes and mines and detonated the most powerful non-nuclear explosion in history, right in the middle of the island. The shockwaves of Operation Big Bang shattered windows sixty kilometres away and crowned the island with a column of jet-black smoke three thousand metres high,

he put on as much of his clothing as he could fit over his body and covered himself with five blankets, pulling them up to his neck, intending to “burn out” the fever, a home remedy he had learned from his mother

Sufi mystic Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, known simply as Hafez.

When the troops distributed what little foodstuffs arrived in their country from Germany, total chaos ensued: during one of the disturbances, Schrödinger watched the mob knock a policeman from his horse. In five minutes, the beast was dismembered by a hundred women, who flocked around the cadaver to tear away the very last strips of its flesh.

the philosophy of Vedanta,

Schrödinger. His hunger for knowledge extended to all areas of science, including biology and botany; moreover, he was obsessed with painting, theatre, music, philology and the study of Classics.

“One ghost succeeds the other like waves on the illusory sea of birth and death. In the course of a life, there is nothing but the rise and fall of material and mental forms, while the unfathomable reality remains. In every creature sleeps an infinite intelligence, hidden and unknown, but destined to awaken, to tear the volatile web of the sensory mind, break the chrysalis of flesh, and conquer time and space.”

Paul Dirac went even further: the eccentric English genius, whose mathematical abilities were legendary, said that the Austrian’s equation contained practically all physics known up to that moment and—at least in principle—all of chemistry as well. Schrödinger had touched glory.

Heisenberg’s discovery: what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be perfectly apprehended. However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.

Old masters and young revolutionaries had travelled from all over Europe to participate in the Fifth Solvay Conference, the most prestigious scientific gathering of the era. Never before or again were so many geniuses united beneath the same roof: seventeen of them had won, or would go on to win, the Nobel Prize,

Reality, they said to those present, does not exist as something separate from the act of observation. A quantum object has no intrinsic properties. An electron is not in any fixed place until it is measured; it is only in that instant that it appears. Before being measured, it has no attributes; prior to observation, it cannot even be conceived of. It exists in a specific manner when it is detected by a specific instrument. Between one measurement and the next, there is no point in asking how it moves, what it is, or where it is located. Like the moon in Buddhism, a particle does not exist: it is the act of measuring that makes it a real object.

But de Broglie had lost something during those five days. Although he received the Nobel Prize in 1929 for his doctoral dissertation on matter waves, he capitulated to Heisenberg and Bohr’s vision, and spent the rest of his career as a simple university professor,