When We Cease to Understand the World

by Benjamín Labatut

As soon as it appeared, Prussian Blue caused a sensation in European art. Thanks to its lower price, in just a few years it had all but replaced the colour that painters had used since the Renaissance to depict the robes of the angels and the Virgin’s mantle—ultramarine, the finest and costliest of all blue pigments, which was obtained by grinding lapis lazuli brought up from caves in Afghanistan’s Kochka river valley. Crushed to a fine powder, this mineral yielded a lavish indigo, which proved impossible to emulate by chemical means until the eighteenth century, when a Swiss pigmenter and dyer by the name of Johann Jacob Diesbach discovered Prussian Blue.

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It was not politicians who would destroy the planet, he told them, but scientists like them who were “marching like sleepwalkers towards the apocalypse”.

During his talks, he gave away apples and figs grown in his garden and warned about the destructive power of science: “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

He was convinced that the environment had its own consciousness and that it was his duty to protect it.

the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.

Hafez had been a drunken saint, a mystic and a hedonist. He devoted himself to prayer, poetry and alcohol.

it was something constitutive of matter itself, a principle that governed the way in which all things were created, and that seemed to exclude the possibility that a given phenomenon should possess certain perfectly defined attributes simultaneously. His original intuition had been correct: it was impossible to “see” a quantum entity for the simple reason that it did not have a single identity.

Heisenberg explained; they are not things, but possibilities.

The method of analysing, explaining and classifying the world has become conscious of its own limitations: these arise from the fact that its interventions alter the objects it proposes to investigate. The light science shines on the world not only changes our vision of reality, but even the behaviour of its fundamental building blocks.”

His green gas killed thousands and made countless soldiers claw at their throats as the poison boiled inside their lungs, drowning them in their own vomit and phlegm, while his fertilizer, which he harvested from the nitrogen present in the air itself, saved hundreds of millions from famine and fuelled our current overpopulation.

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.

It was as if Einstein had given up physics after publishing his theory of relativity, or Maradona had decided never to touch a ball after winning the World Cup.