Review
By Benjamin Labatut – Goodreads
Unravels, story by story, from the real to the arcane. The first one, about the development of cyanide, supposedly only has one fictional paragraph; the last one, “The Night Gardener,” is an autofictional, present-day review of the book’s themes that contains its own paranormal particulars. I think the spirit of the book is pretty well summarized in the latter:
Quote
“Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging, and beautiful of all our physical theories. … We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes…”
Labatut talks of solving equations as if these scientists are performing pagan rites. The stories are just shy of being idealized enough to read like hagiographies. I found this format challenging, as I kept wondering about the point of it all as we delved absurdly far into these “characters’” psyches, in a way I wouldn’t have if this were a guaranteed fiction. That said, this was a great read.
In The Need for Roots, Simone Weil describes risk as essential for intellectual life but warns of “going beyond the soul’s resources.” (Weil also wrote as if divinely inspired, particularly toward the end of her life.) These scientists experience affliction in proportion to their intellect. They experience psychosis, primal humiliation, and irrational degrees of interpersonal conflict. Something of their human souls has been stripped during the course of their accomplishments. Much to think about.
Selected concepts and passages
Schwarzschild’s Singularity
- “Schwarzschild complains of something strange that had begun to grow inside him: ‘I don’t know how to name or define it, but it has an irrepressible force and darkens all my thoughts. It is a void without form or dimension, a shadow I can’t see, but one I can feel with the entirety of my soul.’”
- “Physics was not enough for him. He aspired to the type of knowledge the alchemists had pursue, and labored beneath the sway of a strange urgency that not even he could fully explain: ‘Often I have been unfaithful to the heavens. My interest has never been limited to things situated in space, beyond the moon, but has rather followed those threads woven between them and the darkest zones of the human soul, as it is there that the new light of science must be shown.’”
- Reminds me of what Lyddon writes in “Affliction II” about Risk is necessary for intellectual life, after Weil: “The balance is very difficult. The average lifespan of thinkers like this—mystics, essentially—tends to be short. Output in the last period of life tends to be rapid, outpacing anything before, pouring out as if divinely inspired. Think of Plath’s Ariel.”
- “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?”
When We Cease to Understand the World
- “The physicist—like the poet—should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections.”
- “Schrodinger told him there surely existed things in the world which were immune to common sense metaphors—but the internal structure of the atom was not one of them.”
- “According to the determinists, if one could reveal the laws that governed matter, one could reach back to the most archaic past and predict the most distant future. If everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state, then merely by looking at the present and running the equations it would be possible to achieve a godlike knowledge of the universe.”
The Night Gardener
- “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.”
- “Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging, and beautiful of all our physical theories. … We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes…”