Benjamin Labatut tells the story of a group of 20th century scientists and mathematicians whose work changed the world and completely changed how we used to think the world worked, adding uncertainty and chaos where once was order.
Among the scientists featured are Fritz Haber, whose methods of extracting nitrogen from the air saved untold millions from famine - but whose discoveries also led to the first weapon of mass destruction, chlorine gas, used to devastating effect in the trenches of World War 1, and then Zyklon A which would eventually become Zyklon B, used in the Nazi death camps to exterminate millions.
Other brilliant minds include Karl Schwarzschild, the genius who created the first exact solution to the equations of general relativity, but who died of a horrible sickness shortly after; the strange life of Alexander Grothendieck and his disciple Shinichi Mochizuki; and the rivalry between Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger as they battled to explain the mysteries of the quantum realm.
I really enjoyed When We Cease to Understand the World which is a compelling mix of history, science and fiction that informs and enlightens as much as it entertains.
As Labatut notes in his acknowledgements, the book becomes progressively more novelistic with the early sections - Prussian Blue, Schwarzschild’s Singularity and The Heart of the Heart - reading more like history essays, while the later sections - When We Cease to Understand the World and The Night Gardener - reading like historical fiction, dramatising the facts in ways the author couldn’t possibly know.
I much prefer the early sections - Labatut is utterly mesmerising in his way of relating the lives of these astonishing individuals, making impressive leaps from Goering’s Nuremberg cell where he killed himself with hidden cyanide to the workshop of 18th century Dutch painter Pieter van der Werff, or Einstein’s apartment at teatime to an apocalyptic vision of a black sun that destroys the world. He connects the threads beautifully and crafts an incredibly compelling and varied narrative full of amazing details.
When the book becomes more novelistic, the pacing drags - like in the titular part where we follow Schrodinger’s stay at a sanatorium and he becomes enamoured of the teenage daughter of the sanatorium’s chief doctor. Schrodinger and the girl meet, have lessons, go walking, etc. and then this repeats and repeats. It’s quite dull and I would’ve preferred if Labatut had simply stuck to the facts as this fictional treatment of the material really didn’t add much.
Similarly, the final part, The Night Gardener, is an underwhelming ending to the blistering start and only serves as an unnecessary echo to the section on Grothendieck.
Still, it’s a fascinating and brilliant novel about the unstoppable progress of science and maths and its subsequent wonders and terrors. Grothendieck and Mochizuki both made startling breakthroughs and then refused to explain their theories, in fact actively tried undoing their work. In starting the book by highlighting the unforeseen consequences of Haber’s discoveries, as well as Schwarzschild’s singularity, Labatut is suggesting that Grothendieck and Mochizuki both discovered something horrendous - something far worse than poison gas - in their work that could well lead to humanity’s extinction, and that’s why they tried to undo their calculations.
As well as Labatut is able to describe them, I won’t claim to fully understand the theories presented in the novel (even Schrodinger created a quantum equation he didn’t understand which is baffling to me - how can someone create an equation without understanding it?!), but I finally understood the point of Schrodinger’s cat, which is a way of explaining quantum particles - apparently these crazy things only exist when you see them!
Even if the latter half of the novel becomes weaker the closer you get to the end, When We Cease to Understand the World is still a fantastic novel and, like his other book The Maniac, I really enjoyed reading it. If reading about the lives and work of brilliant physicists and mathematicians sounds like a good time to you, you can’t go wrong with any book that has Benjamin Labatut’s name on the cover.
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