When We Cease to Understand the World: shooketh
This book isn’t fringe-level story-telling, in that it doesn’t pick at the anomalies in the history of science to show us quirky and overlooked stories the way some authors (coughs Malcolm Gladwell) like to do. It tells the story of all those big names we grew up with on textbooks who seriously, beyond a shadow of a doubt, revolutionized the world. The book shifts our focus to the careers of these people, beyond the hotly debated pronunciations in class. (Is “de Broglie” supposed to be “de broh-g-ly” or is it like “de broy”?) It’s peculiar how we (at least I) don’t often think of these names as real people, but some princes of physics or giants with tall shoulders we stand upon and peer over.
When theoretical physics and mathematics become so pure that most of us are a speck of dust on the horizon, nodding along and pretending we comprehend, there are these scientists, who border between extreme levels of genius and madness, accelerating, pursuing, and pushing asymptotes that nobody knows if anyone can ever even reach.
But the deeper into pure mathematics and physics you venture, the more massively isolating responsibility you can have over the truth. Does the dissemination of this truth create a better world, or does it unleash more grotesque burdens and unfixable rifts? And when pursued to extremes, there are no real distinctions between the purest of theoretical sciences and the society which connects us all, where science was used in the most horrendous warfare (chlorine gas) but also rescued humanity (with the Haber–Bosch process), where scientists enlisted, fought, and died like any other soldier, and where scientists felt so much burden they exited from the world and refused to pursue any more answers.
Mathematics, physics, and astronomy constitute a single body of knowledge, and science must be raised to the heights already achieved by philosophy and art, for only the vision of a whole, like that of a saint, a madman, or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principle of the universe.
When pursued to extremes, our minds struggle to make sense of anything, toil against the limits of meaning, while trying to see everything, bringing all things into purview. What drives someone to enforce a declaration of non-publication, to remove all of their life’s works from university libraries around the world, to prohibit all of their texts from being published, and erase all of their influence and traces of existence? I was privileged enough to venture inside the lives of scientists in the past century who are so prodigious that I don’t even dare imagine them having existed in real life. I even witnessed Mochizuki’s internal struggles in the past decades about publishing his 600-page proof. Seeing how their lives played out before them is chilling, at times claustrophobic. Searching for meaning on the boundaries and advancing the world’s knowledge releases endorphins, but at times it feels like we’re watching someone, a poor chap, not waving but drowning. And we realize the insurmountable sacrifice individuals have made for knowledge, how one life can dedicate everything for the rest of the world. With conflicted emotions, we also see that we may never be able to fully understand the true nature of our world in our own lifetimes, or in humanity’s lifetime.
Benjamin Labatut, how do you do it? Did Schrödinger keep a journal, or how else could you have documented his racing heart and pedophilic infatuations (excuse me,, begging you to spare us the details next time) in a chronological account with such clarity? Labatut’s book is an eerie read for anyone who is interested in not so much the history of science, but the people behind the science, and how the kaleidoscope brings together all of those beams of social, historical, and modern-day influences.
