Benjamn Labatuts When We Cease to Understand the World, Reviewed – The New Yorker

Like Sebald, Labatut sees historys patterns as cyclical rather than linear, crossing similar terrain again and again as they wend their way toward disaster. But he is focussed equally on the question of what happens once we become aware of the enormity of the destruction that humankind is capable of inflicting on the worldand whether our brains are wired to cope with that fatal understanding. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

For Schwarzschild, the key to the universe lay in astronomy. Born in Germany in the late nineteenth century, he built his own telescope as a child and published his first astronomy paper at sixteen. By twenty-eight, he was the director of the observatory at the University of Gttingen. Like many German Jews, he was deeply patriotic: as Labatut tells it, he believed that Germany could someday rise to the height of ancient Greece in its ability to civilize the world, but first its scholarship in science must equal its achievements in philosophy and art. Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe, Labatut quotes him as writing.

When, late in 1915, Einstein published his theory of general relativity, Schwarzschild was serving in the German Army. Within a month, he had solved Einsteins field equations, and what he found profoundly destabilized his own conception of the organization of space. According to Schwarzschilds calculations, when a star is in the throes of collapse, it compresses, its density increasing until the force of gravity distorts space and time around it. The result, in Labatuts words, is an inescapable abyss permanently cut off from the rest of the universe, at the center of which lies the singularity, where the notions of space and time themselves became meaningless.

By now, the concept of the black hole is familiar. But at the time it seemed a harbinger of chaos and destruction. Inside the void his metrics predicted, the fundamental parameters of the universe switched properties: space flowed like time, time stretched out like space, Labatut writes. If a hypothetical traveler were capable of surviving a journey through this rarefied zone, he would receive light and information from the future, which would allow him to see events that had not yet occurred. A person who stood within the singularityimpossible, since gravity would tear him to bitscould see both the entire future evolution of the universe at an inconceivable pace and the past frozen in a single instant. The singularity itself is surrounded by a barrier marking a point of no return, beyond which nothing can cross without getting sucked in; the dimension of this boundary is now known as the Schwarzschild radius.

Up to here, this chronicle of Schwarzschilds life is largely verifiable. Now Labatut takes matters a step further. Not only was Schwarzschild terrified by his discovery, in Labatuts telling, but he became obsessed with it. He supposedly confessed to a colleague who visited him in the military hospitalhe was suffering from pemphigus, a painful and disfiguring autoimmune disease primarily affecting the skinthat the true horror of the singularity was that it was a blind spot in the universe, fundamentally unknowable. If the physical world was capable of generating such a monstrosity, what about the human psyche? Could a sufficient concentration of human willmillions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic spaceunleash something comparable to the singularity? In Schwarzschilds mind, such a thing was taking place at that very moment in Germany. He had visions of a black sun dawning over the horizon, capable of engulfing the entire world. By the time people became aware of it, it would be too late:

The singularity sent forth no warnings. The point of no returnthe limit past which one fell prey to its unforgiving pullhad no sign or demarcation.... If such was the nature of that threshold, Schwarzschild asked, his eyes shot through with blood, how would we know if we had already crossed it?

The gravitational pull of fiction in this book works in a similar fashion. The dividing line between reality and imagination is not marked; it is only after several paragraphs or pages that we realize we have crossed it. We know, for instance, that Heisenberg did indeed travel to Helgoland in 1925, seeking relief from his allergy to pollen (the microscopic particles that were torturing him), and there reached his understanding of the behavior of elementary particles, discovering a way to describe the location of an electron and its interaction with other particles. But did the frenzy of his intellectual energy combine with fever to generate nightmares in which the Sufi mystic Hafez appeared in his bedroom, offered him a wineglass filled with blood, and masturbated in front of him before receiving oral sex from Goethe? We assume not, but the boundary is obscured by the gothic fervor of Labatuts narration, in which even mundane details are relayed with heavy melodrama: Heisenbergs allergies transform him into a monster, his lips swollen like a rotten peach with the skin ready to come off.

Likewise, we know that the physicist Erwin Schrdinger spent time in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, but Labatut seems to have invented a fantasy romance for him there, involving the teen-age daughter of the doctor who runs the institution. Herself a TB patient, she distracts herself from her illness by experimenting with a type of aphid that gestates while still in utero, resulting in three generations nestled one inside the other. She separates them and exposes them to a pesticide thatsure enoughstained the glass such a striking shade of blue that it seemed as though she were looking at the primordial colour of the sky. Like those aphids, the stories in this book nest inside one another, their points of contact with reality almost impossible to fully determine. As the layers of patterns and affinities accumulated, I realized that I was no longer compulsively Googling, instead allowing the stories to flow.

There is liberation in the vision of fictions capabilities that emerges herethe sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men. But there is also something questionable, evennightmarish, about it. If fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to find language for those things we know to be true? In the era of fake news, more and more people feel entitled to make our own reality, as Karl Rove put it. In the current American political climate, even scientific factthe very material with which Labatut spins his webis subject to grossly counter-rational denial. Is it responsible for a fiction writer, or a writer of history, to pay so little attention to the line between the two?

Labatut seems to gesture toward a justification for his mode of narrative in his long section on Heisenberg and Schrdinger, which gives the book itsEnglish title. (In Spanish, it is called Un Verdor Terrible, which might be translated as something like A Terrible Greenness, a reference to another nightmarish vision, this one supposedly experienced by Haber, of plants taking over the world.) Heisenberg argued that quantum objects have no intrinsic properties; an electron does not occupy a fixed location until it is measured. In Labatuts telling, Heisenberg, following this idea to its limits, reflects:

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Benjamn Labatuts When We Cease to Understand the World, Reviewed - The New Yorker