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The Haber–Bosch process is the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century. By doubling the amount of disposable nitrogen, it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years. Today, nearly fifty per cent of the nitrogen atoms in our bodies are artificially created, and more than half the world population depends on foodstuffs fertilized thanks to Haber’s invention.
deformed. In his article “On the Admissible Curvature of Space” he analysed the possibility that we inhabited a semi-spherical universe, yielding a world that would turn in on itself like an ouroboros: “We would be faced with a fairyland geometry, a hall of mirrors whose horrifying perspectives would be more than the civilized mind could bear, as it abhors and flees from all it cannot comprehend.”
Schrödinger’s equation was a Promethean fire capable of dissipating the darkness of the subatomic realm, revealing a world that until then had been veiled with mystery.
he was unwilling to accept the restrictions demanded by Heisenberg, who seemed to have gouged out both his eyes in order to see further.
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.
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, including Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Planck and Marie Curie, who had won it twice and was overseeing the conference committee along with Hendrik Lorentz and Albert Einstein.
