When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

Dippel had the gift of dispossessing people of their faith and depriving them of all intelligence and goodwill. He would entice his followers with promises of apotheosis only to “abandon them in a state of delirium”.

Swedenborg likens him to Satan himself: “He is the wickedest of demons, bound by no principle, indeed, generally opposed to all of them.”

His aim was to enter history as the first man to transplant a soul from one body to another,

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.

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?

certain things should remain hidden, “for the good of all of us”.

Minhyong Kim, Mochizuki’s roommate at Princeton, remembers having found him delirious at midnight after days without sleep or food. Exhausted and dehydrated, he babbled incoherently, his pupils as wide as an owl’s. He spoke of the “heart of the heart”, an entity Grothendieck had discovered at the very centre of mathematics, which had completely unhinged him.

“What stimulates me is not ambition or the thirst for power. It is the acute perception of something immense and yet very delicate at the same time.”

“The atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicists armed with a fistful of equations.” Grothendieck

Where is the colour that might tame the sky? / The grey mist leaves me blind / the more I look, the less I see.

Heisenberg fought to shape his epiphany into a publishable article.

The thesis you hold in your hands makes plain that for each particle of matter—electron or proton—there exists an associated wave that transports it through space. I realize many of you will doubt my reasoning. I confess that it is the fruit of solitude. I admit its character is bizarre, and I accept whatever calumny may come to me if it is shown to be false. And yet today I say to you with absolute certainty that all things can exist in two ways, and that nothing is as solid as it appears; the stone in the child’s hand, which he aims at the idle sparrow on its branch, could run like water between his fingers.”

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.

The night gardener used to be a mathematician, and now speaks of mathematics as former alcoholics speak of booze, with a mixture of fear and longing.

The majority of historical and biographical references employed in the book can be found in the following books and articles, whose authors I would also like to thank, although a complete list would be excessively long: Walter Moore, Schrödinger: Life and Thought; Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality; Christianus Democritus, Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the Flesh; John Gribbin, Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution; Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World; Alexander Grothendieck, Récoltes et Semailles; Arthur I. Miller, Erotica, Aesthetics and Schrödinger’s Wave Equation; Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science; David Lindley, Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science; Winfried Scharlau and Melissa Schneps (trans.), Who Is Alexander Grothendieck? Anarchy, Mathematics, Spirituality, Solitude; Ian Kershaw, Hitler; W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn; Karl Schwarzschild, Collected Works; Jeremy Bernstein, The Reluctant Father of Black Holes.