This image, with its duelling interpretations, was constantly on my mind as I worried over "When We Cease to Understand the World", a haunting new book by Benjamín Labatut. After starting with the glass vials of cyanide that members of the Hitler Youth allegedly handed out to concertgoers at the Berlin Philharmonic's last Nazi-era performance, Labatut works his way back to experiments conducted in Berlin in the first decade of the eighteenth century by the dyer Johann Jacob Diesbach, who was working in a laboratory set up by the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel.
The stories here circle obsessively around the question of whether some of the twentieth century's greatest minds drove themselves to the brink of insanity-and, in Labatut's accounts, well beyond it-in their search for a key to the secrets of the universe. 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. "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.
There is liberation in the vision of fiction's capabilities that emerges here-the sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men.
source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/a-cautionary-tale-about-science-raises-uncomfortable-questions-about-fiction
Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.