When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

I am tired of hearing the officers say that we are ever closer to victory, and that the end of the war is in reach. Don’t they understand that we are rising up only to fall?”

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?

But Schwarzschild was inconsolable. He babbled about a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world, and he lamented that there was nothing we could do about it.

On September 1, 1939—the same day the Nazi tanks crossed the Polish frontier—Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder published an article in Volume 56 of the Physical Review. In it, the two physicists from North America demonstrated beyond all shadow of a doubt that “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.

Thom abandoned pure mathematics to develop catastrophe theory, a mathematical treatment that describes seven ways in which any dynamic system—be it a river, a tectonic fault or the fragile mind of a human being—can suddenly lose its equilibrium and collapse, falling into disorder and chaos. •