Written By: Oliver Heffron
When We Cease to Understand the World, a diverse and genre-shifting series of meditations from Chilean author Benjamín Labatut explores the connection between abysmal scientific discovery, personal horror, and the societal catastrophes of the 20th century. Vitalizing unbelievable things that actually happened, the fascinating and masterful book explores the profound universal mysteries which unraveled and bewitched the minds behind the 20th century’s most significant and terrifying discoveries. While the expertly researched history is enlightening and fascinating, what makes Labatut’s book an unforgettable and powerful read is his careful employment of fiction to unravel and express the deep, haunting and universal mystery which lies just beyond the borders of a scientific equation and nonfiction.
Split into five sections, When We Cease to Understand the World shifts in its narrative style with each subject. The opening “Prussian Blue” is a nearly entirely nonfiction essay about the all-encompassing history of cyanide, setting the stage for the book’s unsettling scientific exploration deep within the most horrifying crevice of the 20th century’s intersection between scientific discovery and genocidal catastrophe: Herman Göring’s narcotic, suicidal bunker. From this dark starting place, Labatut flows skillfully from one mind-blowing anecdote to the next: a demented alchemist’s morbid experiments incidentally creating the beautiful hue of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa to Fritz Haber’s polarizing twin-discoveries of both the life-saving anecdote to humanity’s grave-robbing nitrogen need and the pesticide “Zyklon B” which would eventually murder Haber’s extended family after his death.
Labatut then shifts to a short story format for the following two sections to unveil the interior workings of three enigmatic scientists forever haunted by what they discovered saw at the very edges of conscious understanding. “Schwarzchild’s Singularity” tells the unbelievable true story of Karl Schwarzchild, the German scientist who solved Einstein’s theory of general relativity within a month of its publication while dodging mortar shells at the front of WWI, but also created the space-time shattering “singularity,” leading to the discovery of black holes. Facing death from a rare disease only months from his breakthrough, Labatut powerfully ascribes the core of Schwarzchild’s ominous fears about what his singularity revealed:
“the true horror, he said, was that the singularity was a blind spot, fundamentally unknowable. Light could never escape from it, so our eyes were incapable of seeing it. Nor could our minds grasp it, because at the singularity the laws of general relativity simply broke down. Physics no longer had any meaning. … 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? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually taking place in the Fatherland.”
“The Heart of the Heart” utilizes a similar format with more fictional liberties to tell the
interconnected stories of Alexander Grothendieck and Shinichi Mochizuki, two mathematical mavericks who discovered some central, universal concept so unsettling and horrible they both respectively tried to destroy everything they had ever published.
The most extended, titular section, “When We Cease to Understand the World” weaves a novella about two competing, polarising visions of how to classify the interior workings of atoms and how this competition to classify the smallest visible occurrences in our universe laid the groundwork for humanity’s most ambitious scientific development: quantum physics. Labatut portrays how the spark of modern technological brilliance was discovered from hitting a complete wall of understanding, ultimately reshaping our understanding of the universe to such an extent that being a human no longer makes very much sense. Labatut fictionalizes Heisenberg’s quest against Schrödinger’s wave with moments of brilliant, gothic imagination that illustrates the unraveling blindspot at the heart of our most innovative technology: the scientist watching Goethe sexually embrace the body of the Sufi poet Hafez; a menacing stranger forcing a hallucinatory green shot down Heisenberg’s throat and chasing him into a pulsating forest of epiphany before he ends up running away from his own shadow; finally his unsaid, haunting premonition of nuclear destruction, Labatut placing ghosts of the future generations at Heisenberg’s confused feet: “as if wishing to warn him of something, before they were carbonized in an instant by a flash of blind light.”
The book culminates in its most fantastic yet informationally efficient narrative, “The Night Gardener,” distilling the sprawling, mind-bending concepts of the book into a charming series of interactions between the narrator and his green-thumbed, moon-loving neighbor: “I asked him how long my own citrus had to live. He told me that there was no way to know, at least not without cutting it down and looking inside its trunk. But, really, who wanted to do that?” When We Cease to Understand the World tells a true story of modern science and catastrophe, utilizing moments of fiction to unearth deeper truths about the internal and societal psychological effects of existing within a world in which our means of understanding have outpaced our mental limits of comprehension. It’s a literary triumph that leaves you knowing you enlightened with gratefulness towards our universal ignorance, and the ultimate mystique of the universe that can only be imagined through fiction.
