When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

many of the Nazi leaders chose to shoot themselves in the head at the same moment they bit down, afraid that they had been sabotaged, that the capsules were deliberately adulterated to provoke not the painless, instant death that they desired but the slow agony they deserved.

An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts.

Although Einstein himself took to the study of “matrix mechanics” as if it were a map to a buried treasure, there was something about the ideas of the young German physicist that he found truly repulsive. “Heisenberg’s theory is the most interesting of all recent contributions,” he wrote to his friend Michele Besseo, “a devilish calculation that incorporates infinite determinants and uses matrices instead of coordinates. It’s quite brilliant. And its cursed complexity insulates it from being easily disproven.” But what Einstein abhorred was not the formulae’s hermeticism, but something far more important: the world Heisenberg had discovered was incompatible with common sense.