When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

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?

“When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless it reduces its mass due to fission, rotation or radiation, this contraction will continue indefinitely,” forming the black hole that Schwarzschild had prophesied, capable of crumpling space like a piece of paper and extinguishing time like a blown-out candle, and no natural law or physical force could avert it.

Tell me, Professor, when did all this madness begin? When did we cease to understand the world?”

what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself.

Where before there had been a cause for every effect, now there was a spectrum of probabilities. In the deepest substrate of all things, physics had not found the solid, unassailable reality Schrödinger and Einstein had dreamt of, ruled over by a rational God pulling the threads of the world, but a domain of wonders and rarities, borne of the whims of a many-armed goddess toying with chance.

Like the moon in Buddhism, a particle does not exist: it is the act of measuring that makes it a real object.

“God does not play dice with the universe!”