An infinitesimal existence
on When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
“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 shone.”
I have not lost sleep over a book in a very long time. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut is a stunning spectacle, bending genres and crossing fact with fiction through tales and anecdotes from some of the world’s greatest scientific discoveries. Labatut is an absolute master at weaving tales, connecting incidents that traverse space and time (writing about the anomalies of Karl Schwarzchild’s metrics, the first discovery of the black hole: “Inside the void his metrics predicted, the fundamental parameters of the universe switched properties: space flowed like time, time stretched out like space.”) The common denominator, more often than not, is war – its needs, its failings, the poison it feeds the human mind; like fuel for manic fixation and escapism. Between man grappling with questions of existence and man fighting for their existence, Labatut weaves an intricate web of destinies, in a language and great detail that make happenstance seem like the cruelest twists of fate. This book had me googling like a madman. Most of this text are easily verifiable, and the rest of it too irresistible to not accept as fact.
The story began with Hermann Göring, who chose to ingest a cyanide pill when his request to be killed by a firing squad was denied by the Nuremburg Tribunal. Many of the Nazi party elites committed suicide by various means, but cyanide pills, frighteningly, were sponsored goods: Before the city fell in April 1945, at the end of a special concert of the Berlin Philharmonic organised by Albert Speer, members of the Hitler Youth distributed cyanide pills in wicker baskets, “like votive offerings at mass”. The liquid form of cyanide, traded under the name Zyklon B, was the poison used to kill more than one million Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other extermination camps. The irony is chilling. But Labatut takes us further to the genesis of cyanide, first isolated from a synthetic pigment called Prussian Blue. The pigment was discovered by the Swiss pigmenter and dyer Johann Jacob Diesbach, who had initially wanted to create an imitation of a ruby red pigment that could only be produced by crushing female cochineals, small parasitic insects that grow on nopal cacti. Instead he discovered a blue so exquisite that he believed he had discovered hsbd-iryt, a blue fabled to have been used by ancient Egyptians to adorn the skin of their Gods. Then, the story catapulted back to Zyklon B and its inventor Fritz Haber, who was declared a war criminal for the use of poison gas in WWI. After he fled Germany and took residence in Switzerland, he was conferred the Nobel prize for a discovery he made before the war: synthetic fertilizer. Fritz Haber pulled Nitrogen out of thin air, and with it he helped put a stop to a looming global famine at the beginning of the 20th century, and propelled a boom that grew human populace from 1.6 billion to 7 billion in less than a hundred years. Then, with practised composure, Labatut tells us that Fritz Haber’s discovery was not intended to feed the world but to help Germany produce more gunpowder and explosives; dragging the war for two additional years and raising casualties by millions. In Europe, his fellow scientists rebuked him for his contribution to the war, leading him to take up a post in the Middle East. En route in Basel, he died of sudden heart failure.
It is only here that Labatut reveals that Fritz Haber was Jewish, and that many of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust using the gas he invented. The incinerated remains would often be buried in pit graves or rivers and ponds, or distributed to the surrounding lands as – fertilisers. Labatut writes this as a matter of factly, leaving us to digest the horror of this revelation, of history repeating itself. He ended this story with a letter Haber wrote his wife. He felt guilt over his discovery of synthetic nitrogen, not because it had killed many, but because he thought he had altered the natural equilibrium. He feared plants will overtake human beings, “suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure,” (the original title of the book, “Un Verdor Terrible”, roughly translates to “A Terrible Greening.”)This is the theme that underpins this book: a stifling surplus, an excess with no return, the overgrowth of the mind, the diminishing returns of genius. Reading Labatut’s tales is an exercise in both awe and humility; stories of the greatness and infinite curiosity of the human mind, and its infinitesimal capacity to decipher the vastness of universe and its equally vast anomalies in formulas and equations. There is no surprise that these scientists descend into madness in their attempt to codify the mysteries of the universe, for with every discovery it slips further from their grasp: Karl Schwarzschild, after discovering the solution to Einstein’s field equations, found singularity, the first characterisation of the black hole; Heisenberg, looking to determine the movements of subatomic particles, found only probabilities – a universe ruled by pure chance and a principle of uncertainty. “God does not play dice with the universe!”, Einstein told Bohr at the end of the Copenhagen Interpretation, but in Labatut’s maze, and in the contemporary knowledge and history of quantum physics, indeed he might; indeed he does.
At the end of his book Labatut conjures a story of a night gardener, a neighbourhood enthusiast who tells him tales of plants, herbs and the lives of great scientists. The night gardener used to be a mathematician, now confounded by the endless expanse of the universe mankind might never decipher, and disillusioned by how much destruction have been brought by discoveries with mathematics at its core. Do you know how citrus trees die? He asks the narrator, and the following passage is worth writing in full, for it concludes the tale of excessive genius and preserves the unbearable vastness of the universe – at once relieving and aggravating:
“When they come to the end of their life cycle, they put out a final, massive crop of lemons. In their last spring their flowers bud and blossom an enormous bunches and fill the air with a smell so sweet that it stings your nostrils from two blocks away; then their fruits ripen all at once, whole limbs break off due to the excessive weight, and after a few weeks the ground is covered with rotting lemons. It is a strange sight, he said, to see such exuberance before death. One can picture it in animal species, those million Salmon mating and spawning before dropping dead, or the billions of herrings that turn the seawater white with their sperm and eggs and cover the coasts of the northeast Pacific for hundreds of miles. But trees are very different organisms, and such displays of overripening feel out of character for a plant and more akin to our own species, with its uncontrolled, devastating growth. 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 would want to do that?”
Labatut circles time back to Haber’s terrible greening, into a bottomless pit of contradictions and anomalies; of cosmic devastations and limitless possibilities. It’s electric.
