When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

Diesbach tried to put an end to it by pouring sale tartari (potash) over a distillation of animal parts mixed by one of his apprentices, the young alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel; but the concoction, instead of producing the furious carmine of the Dactylopius coccus, yielded a blue of such beauty that 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, its formula was stolen by a Greek thief and lost forever after the fall of the Roman Empire.

A genius unjustly forgotten, Scheele endured bad luck his entire life: the chemist with the most discoveries of natural elements to his name (seven, including oxygen, which he called “fire air”), he invariably shared credit for each of his finds with less talented scientific colleagues who anticipated him in making their conclusions public.

When Haber returned victorious from the massacre at Ypres, Clara accused him of perverting science by devising a method for exterminating human beings on an industrial scale. Haber ignored her: for him, war was war and death was death, regardless of the means of its infliction. He used his two days’ furlough to invite his friends to a party that lasted until dawn, and, at its end, his wife walked down to the garden, took off her shoes, and shot herself in the chest with her husband’s service revolver. She bled to death in the arms of their thirteen-year-old son, who had run downstairs when he heard the shot. Still in shock, Fritz Haber had to travel the following day to oversee a gas attack on the eastern front. Throughout the war, he went on refining techniques for releasing the gas more efficiently, all the while haunted by his wife’s ghost. “It really does me good, every few days, to be at the front, where the bullets fly. There, the only thing that counts is the moment, and one’s sole duty is whatever one can do within the confines of the trenches. But then it’s back to command headquarters, chained to the telephone, and I hear in my heart the words that the poor woman once said, and, in a vision born of weariness, I see her head emerging from between the orders and the telegrams, and I suffer.”

In 1907, Haber was the first to obtain nitrogen, the main nutrient required for plant growth, directly from the air. In this way, from one day to the next, he addressed the scarcity of fertilizer that threatened to unleash an unprecedented global famine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Had it not been for Haber, hundreds of millions of people who until then had depended on natural fertilizers such as guano and saltpetre for their crops would have died from lack of nourishment. 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. On the other side of the Atlantic, the craniums of more than thirty million bison slaughtered on the plains were scavenged by poor Native Americans and peasant farmers, picked up one by one and sold to the Northwestern B...

Emboldened by his successes with nitrogen, Haber proposed to reconstitute the Weimar Republic and pay the war reparations that were strangling its economy through a process as wondrous as the one that had won him the Nobel Prize: harvesting gold from the waves of the sea. Travelling under a false identity to avoid raising suspicions, he gathered five thousand samples of water from assorted seas across the globe, including bits of ice from the North Pole and Antarctica. He was convinced he could mine the gold dissolved in the oceans, but after years of arduous labour had to accept that his original calculations had overestimated the quantities of this precious metal by several orders of magnitude. He returned to his country empty-handed.

Among the few possessions Fritz Haber had with him when he died was a letter written to his wife. In it, he confessed that he felt an unbearable guilt; not for the part he had played, directly or indirectly, in the death of untold human beings, but because his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium of the planet that he feared the world’s future belonged not to mankind but to plants, as all that was needed was a drop in population to pre-modern levels for just a few decades to allow them to grow without limit, taking advantage of the excess nutrients humanity had bestowed upon them to spread out across the earth and cover it completely, suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure.

In all that he did, Schwarzschild would take things to the limit; during an expedition to the Alps, at the invitation of his brother Alfred, he ordered their guides to loosen the ropes at the most dangerous part of a glacier crossing, putting the entire expedition at risk, merely so that he could get closer to two of his colleagues and solve a problem that they had been working on together, by scraping equations into the permafrost with their pickaxes. His recklessness so angered his brother that the two of them never climbed together again, although they had spent nearly every weekend in their university days exploring the mountains of the Black Forest.

When he conducted experiments he was no less impulsive: he would remove pieces from one instrument to use them for another, without leaving any record of what he had done. If he needed a diaphragm in a hurry, he would simply drill a hole in the lens cap. When he left Göttingen to oversee the observatory in Potsdam, his replacement nearly quit before his appointment had begun: upon taking an inventory, in order to determine how badly the facilities had suffered under Schwarzschild, he found a transparency of the Venus di Milo inside the focal plane of the largest telescope, arranged in such a way that the stars of the Cassiopeia constellation outlined the goddess’s arms.

One of his greatest strokes of genius was expanding the notion of the point. Beneath his gaze, the humble dot was no longer a dimensionless position; it swelled with a complex inner structure. Where others had seen a simple locus without depth, size or breadth, Grothendieck saw an entire universe. No one had proposed something so bold since Euclid. • For years, he devoted the whole of his energy, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, to mathematics. He did not read newspapers, watch television or go to the cinema. He liked ugly women, squalid apartments, dilapidated rooms. He worked cloistered in a cold office with flaking paint falling from the walls, his back turned to the only window, with pen and paper on his desk and only four objects as decoration: his mother’s death mask, a small wire sculpture of a goat, a jar of Spanish olives, and a charcoal portrait of his father, drawn in Le Vernet concentration camp.

“Doing mathematics is like making love,” wrote Grothendieck, whose sexual impulses rivalled his spiritual inclinations. Throughout his life he seduced both men and women. He had three children with his wife, Mireille Dufour, and two more outside his marriage.

He spent the war with no occupation for his mind, awaiting orders that did not come and filling out reports no one read, until he fell into a state of extreme apathy. His staff complained that Schrödinger would not rise before lunchtime and then took naps that lasted the entire afternoon. He felt groggy throughout the day and could not bear to remain standing for more than five minutes at a time. He seemed to have forgotten the names of his comrades, as though a poisonous, corrosive miasma had invaded his mind. Although he tried to use the dead hours to page through the physics articles his colleagues sent him from Austria, he was incapable of concentrating; one thought ran into the next, and he had the sense that the tedium of war was spawning a long-dormant psychosis in him. “Sleep, eat, play cards. Sleep, eat, play cards. Is this a life?” he wrote in his diary.